BOOK REVIEW : Heathcliff Makes His ‘Dramatic’ Return : H.: The Story of Heathcliff’s Journey Back to Wuthering Heights;<i> by Lin Haire-Sargeant</i> Pocket Books $20; 280 pages

Remember the scene in William Wyler’s film: Laurence Olivier, as Heathcliff, striding into the drawing room of Thrushcross Grange--his triumphant return to Catherine Linton, nee Earnshaw, after an absence of three years.

Therein lies one of the most fascinating lacunae of 19th-Century literature: What had happened to Heathcliff? Where had he grown rich, how had he transformed himself from stableboy to gentleman? This is what Lin Haire-Sargeant attempts to answer in “H: The Story of Heathcliff’s Journey Back to Wuthering Heights.”

Of her sister Emily’s novel, Charlotte Bronte wrote: “ ‘Wuthering Heights’ was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials.” “H.,” by contrast, seems to have been blended by a food processor at moderate speed, with bland ingredients; the result is a concoction that, though not successful as literature, is not entirely unsatisfying, if only for the questions it poses.

Haire-Sargeant, a professor of 19th-Century literature at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, uses an epistolary, story-within-a story approach that actually works quite well, given the circular, even incestuous construction of the original. “H.” hinges on a letter from Heathcliff--given to the housekeeper Nelly Dean, but never delivered to Catherine Linton--describing his life during his fateful absence.

The letter finds its way to Lockwood, the unsuspecting tenant whose story opens the narrative of “Wuthering Heights,” and eventually from him to Charlotte and Emily Bronte. (The voice of Charlotte and Nelly are among the more successful elements of “H.,” possibly because they lack Emily’s essential strangeness and hence are easier to ape.)

This structure might have worked well if Haire-Sargeant had been content to merely resurrect the characters of “Wuthering Heights.” Instead she merges those of both “Wuthering Heights” and Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre,” a Bronte-esque bouillabaise that finally strains all willing suspension of disbelief.

Thus, after Heathcliff, having been humiliated by Catherine Earnshaw (“it would degrade me to marry (him)”) escapes to Liverpool he is adopted by a certain rich, mysterious Mr. Are who educates him in everything from table manners to German philosophy. When, after a few chapters, certain familiar names begin to crop up--Mrs. Fairfax the housekeeper, Leah the chambermaid--it becomes clear that Mr. Are is actually Edward Rochester of “Jane Eyre.”

The tying together of the two worlds was, I suppose, prompted by the idea of the childhood Gondal world sagas created, and shared, by all the Bronte sisters. Used here, it is a woeful device.

But this is only one of the problems of this “successor” (in the words of the publicity release) to the original.

First, there’s the issue of recreating the Bronte style, the pulse and throb of which seemed so startingly new in its time (indeed, its passionate, un-English quality prompted many reviewers to emphasize the sisters’ Celtic origins). Second, there’s the even thornier issue of imitating Emily Bronte’s prose--its violent, other-worldly aura, its muscular verbs and savage adjectives, the surging subtext of metaphor and poetry which propels and unifies the story.

There is nothing in “H.” to even remotely approach the wildness of the writing--odd, because there are elements in “H.” which are intrinsically more violent. The scene where Heathcliff semi-castrates the sulking, lily-livered Edgar Linton--yes, gentle Reader--epitomizes the problem: he might as well be trimming fat from a lambchop.

One shudders to think what Emily Bronte would have done with such an incident. In her hands a child wielding a whip--the young Catherine Earnshaw, for instance--seems infinitely crueller by comparison.

The lack of real psychological violence extends to the lack of eroticism in “H.”: This is crucial, as the two are intertwined in the original. Heathcliff’s seduction of the shallow Blanche Ingram should have been darkly sexy, even vampire-like--the sex scene that Bronte might have described between him and Isabella Linton. Instead, it’s just silly.

This juiceless quality seems to cast its aura over the characters themselves: Mr. Are is oddly Henry Higgins-ish, and, worse, ultimately in thrall to a singularly unpleasant Jane Eyre (here, a “midget bride”-cum-dominatrix); Heathcliff’s voice is uneven: At times it’s credible, at others the diction is so high-falutin that he seems to have leapt out of Oscar Wilde.

Most egregious, perhaps, is Haire-Sargeant’s misunderstanding of the crux of romantic passion, as defined by the critic Denis de Rougemont in “Love in the Western World”: there must be suffering, an obstacle.

Near the end of “H.,” for instance, the fictional Emily describes a scenario where Heathcliff and Catherine flee to America: “And when she reached out her hand in the night, he was there; and when he reached out his, there was she likewise.”

At this I paused in disbelief: this image was as far from Bronte’s vision as a Sominex commercial.

Despite its flaws, there is a strange pleasure in seeing these familiar characters strut the stage again--even if the results are more bodice-ripper than gothic, more Hollywood than Haworth.

Which brings us back, with the eery generational echoes of “Wuthering Heights” itself, to the original film and Olivier.

Columnist Liz Smith recently reported that Kenneth Branagh--viewed by many as Olivier’s successor--may assume the part of Heathcliff in a movie version of “H.” To Branagh I say, go to it: even in a bastardized version, there are very few love stories like it.