BOOK REVIEW / FICTION : Healing the Soul--From Camelot to Today : THE RETURN OF MERLIN <i> by Deepak Chopra</i> , Harmony, $24, 422 pages

A London constable and his partner come upon the body of an old man, his neck broken, in a roadside ditch. The old man’s long, white beard reminds the constable, Arthur Callum, of wizards and warlocks--of Merlin the magician. As Arthur leans over “Merlin’s” body, he hears the words, “Please--help. You are needed.” And thus he is drawn into Deepak Chopra’s updating of the Arthurian legend, a tale that casts Merlin as the voice of healing wisdom, and of the writer himself.

In his first novel, “The Return of Merlin,” Chopra, the best-selling health writer, continues his discussion of how our expectations shape our well-being. “Nature is like a radio band with infinite stations,” he wrote in 1991’s “Perfect Health.” “The reality you are now experiencing is only one station on the band, completely convincing as long as you stay tuned to it, but masking the choices that lie on either side.” It seems a short step from there to the fictional admonitions of Merlin that “this world is pure illusion. . . . The illusion was created by [mortals], and now they believe in it too strongly. They use their power to create a drama of birth and death, joy and pain.”

Chopra’s story moves between present-day England and Camelot at the time of its fall to Arthur’s evil son Mordred. The victory of Mordred’s dark forces has unleashed the formidable dragons of guilt and shame that have made for the bleakness of the present. (Yes, there are dragons. Yes, they are identified with guilt and shame. And yes, the lack of subtlety in the book is often striking.)

But wizards, Merlin explains, aren’t bound by the prevailing illusion that time is linear, “so we live in the past, present and future all at once. . . . No one is just here. The straight, narrow lines of time are actually threads of a web that extends into eternity.” Chopra’s characters, then, traverse the web of time to alter the events of the past (and their own consciousnesses) just enough to defeat evil.

Although the plot moves imaginatively through its complex scenario, it can be rough going. Chopra is a good and well-intentioned doctor, but it’s clear that he’s not been drawn to fiction because of an irrepressible talent for prose. He’s discovered the metaphor, as well as the cliche, and he brandishes both, as he might say himself, with abandon.

Occasionally, his descriptive digressions are quite funny: “. . . the forest felt profound fear. Ordinary fear was a grace compared to this. How can the ultimate anxiety be described? Imagine a poor wretch condemned to be hanged, and upon the midnight knell rough hands wake him from a terrified sleep. ‘Stand up,’ a brutal voice commands. A taper is struck and the hand-man surmises shrewdly, ‘I think five turns of the knot will hold you nicely.’ And the condemned man, alone again in the dark, feels his bowels turn to water. That’s the kind of fear the forest felt. . . .”

The reader confronts that passage on Page 9; there’s another kind of anxiety when she realizes she is 400-plus pages from the end of the book. Yet to come are Morgan Le Fay, who appears with the scent of “decayed mushrooms and mouse droppings”; the moon, which “laid down a trail of blue light . . . like a ghostly snail,” and memories of “snatched moments of happiness clutched like chips in greasy newspaper.”

In case the reader is unclear about characters’ symbolic importance, Chopra has studded the book with helpful explanatory monologues: “Mordred is like a dark cloud over the earth,” explains Merlin’s apprentice. “He feeds off fear. War and crime, famine and poverty, all make him grow.”

Perhaps Chopra has turned to fiction out of a desire to reach a larger audience with his message that both individuals and cultures can heal themselves. Or perhaps, the doctor has seen that once cured of all afflictions both bodily and spiritually, one is left with art, art that leaves the wound open, touches it to see that the hurt can still be felt, learns from disease. His impulse to write a novel, then, is probably a benevolent one, a desire to care for human beings as his own character Merlin does.

Unfortunately, good intentions have not made for a good novel. “To the ancients,” one character tells another early in the book, “words were concrete things, not abstractions. Words could enfold magical power. A particularly powerful word could fell a tree or frighten the soul out of your enemy.” “And how did one unlock this power?” “I haven’t learned that yet.” That power is eluding novelist Chopra as well.