BOOK REVIEW : The Family Ties Are Tested to the Third Degree : THREE TIMES TABLE <i> by Sara Maitland</i> A John Macrae book, Henry Holt & Co.$18.95; 216 pages

There must be some unwritten law in the universe which says that, although mothers and daughters may love each other dearly, there will come a time when they turn, for at least some brief part of their lives, into bitter and contemptible enemies.

English author Sara Maitland understands this phenomenon well. “Three Times Tables” is a richly imaginative story, a novel that can be viewed as a kind of fabulist feminist tale as well as a profoundly realistic exploration of one family.

The characters in this novel--three generations of Petherington women; a grandmother, mother and daughter--share a house in London and are stacked up by floor, “like layers of sediment, geological formations each laid down in different eras.”

Rachel, 74, a curator in a museum of natural history whose specialty is dinosaurs, lives on the ground floor. Above her, on the second floor, is Phoebe, her 37-year-old daughter, a never-married mother who works as a gardener in a municipal park.

Above Phoebe, nestled in the attic, is her 15-year-old daughter, Maggie, a child locked in loneliness, “a solitary hermit in teen-age attire” whose psyche is dominated by the figure of Fenna, a dragon conjured into reality.

The book opens on a day when each character is facing a life-altering crisis and poised on the brink of decision. Over the course of the next 200 pages, we learn, through a series of detailed and interconnecting flashbacks, who these women are and what has brought them to their respective moments of crisis. In the process, we also learn something about dinosaurs, dragons, gardening and mathematics.

Rachel, whose reputation as a museum curator is based on her adherence to a “gradualist” theory of evolution, is preparing to submit a paper to a professional journal and her museum colleagues that will contradict her life’s work.

No longer able to ignore the evidence backed by “great leaps in the fossil record,” she has converted to the “catastrophe theory,” which states that instead of a steady and uninterrupted Darwinian model of evolution, there has been a “cosmic crash”--an accidental and random interruption in the genetic lineage. All these years she’s been wrong. Dinosaurs didn’t disappear gradually because of an alteration in their food supply; they were destroyed in a violent meteoric bombardment.

Phoebe, Rachel’s daughter, faces a very different kind of crisis. She is troubled by middle-aged Angst , feelings centered on her failure to fulfill her early promise as a mathematician and her inability, after the death of her adored father, Martin, to form any lasting romantic connection. There is also the matter of the lump in her breast, which she has foolishly ignored and allowed to grow, as if willing her own demise in expiation of her bitter failures in life.

And then there is Maggie, the wan, thin, solitary child, who has determined that it is time to leave childhood and free herself of the influence of Fenna, the darkly compelling dragon-friend, from whom she has learned to fly and thus escape reality. By shedding her childhood illusion, Maggie hopes for “nothing less than a rebirth.”

Their estrangement is so complete that it has metastasized into dislike. The aging Rachel “finds something venal in her daughter, a lack of discipline in every direction, a search after sensation, after emotion for its own sake that she cannot understand and that repels her profoundly.”

In part, what is being described here is one generation’s response to another, the older woman, an academic achiever, is puzzled by a daughter who has spent a good part of her life on the “hippie trail” and now tends to the perennials in the park.

Phoebe, on the other hand, feels burdened by maternal responsibilities and the care of the aging house, which she has been coerced into sharing with her mother. As a result, Maggie, who “could not remember a time when there was not the constant tug of tension between her grandmother and mother,” can only escape on the wings of a dragon. What will happen, she wonders, once she’s banished that dragon and reality sets in?

Nothing much, in fact, actually happens in this book, except that three small and rather poignant stories unfold.

By the end of the book, each character has done a good deal of soul-searching and undergone a significant change. The stories of Maggie, Phoebe and especially the elderly Rachel reflect insight into the fluctuating state of family, illuminating the rages that often accompany love and the ways in which mortals cling to such lofty and immortal hopes for reconciliation.

Next: Carolyn See reviews “Strange Fits of Passion” by Anita Shreve (HBJ).