BOOK REVIEW / FICTION : A Mystic Game That Transcends Sports : THE LEGEND OF BAGGER VANCE Golf and the Game of Life <i> by Steven Pressfield</i> , William Morrow, $20, 252 pages

“Golf is of games the most mystical, the least earthbound, the one wherein the walls between us and the supernatural are rubbed thinnest.”

So said that noted writer, duffer and amateur theologian, John Updike, when he reviewed Michael Murphy’s “Golf in the Kingdom” in 1972.

Golf and mysticism have long gone together--a fact that may astonish people who know the game only in its modern American form: as a high-cost, high-tech adjunct to real-estate promotion. The literature this relationship has inspired ranges from Arnold Haultain’s “The Mystery of Golf” in 1908 through Murphy’s cult classic to Updike’s own “Farrell’s Caddie” just the other year.

Now Steven Pressfield, a Los Angeles screenwriter, has weighed in with a worthy addition to the genre in his first novel, “The Legend of Bagger Vance.”

It’s a tale told in a single night to a despairing young man who plans to quit both golf and medical school. The teller is Dr. Hardison Greaves, who as a 10-year-old in 1931 witnessed an epic golf match at a resort near Savannah, Ga., between Bobby Jones, the greatest amateur of his day, Walter Hagen, the greatest pro, and a local champion named Rannulph Junah.

Junah, a guilt-haunted World War I hero, has wandered the earth in search of enlightenment, accompanied by a mysteriously erudite black servant, Bagger Vance. Junah wants no part of the match, but Vance persuades him to compete as a means of “entering the spirit by way of the flesh.”

Jones and Hagen played a real challenge match in Florida in 1926. (Hagen won.) This rematch is fictional, but Pressfield makes it come vividly alive.

In the course of the 36-hole match, with Vance as his caddie, Junah flounders, rallies, grows arrogant, collapses, sees luminous and terrifying visions, and finally finds his Authentic Swing--or, as Shivas Irons, the mythic Scottish pro in “Golf in the Kingdom,” would call it, True Gravity.

Pressfield’s story is a dazzler and a thought-provoker. But it shares so much with Murphy’s book that we asked Shivas Irons about it.

“Aye, the laddie writes guid,” Irons said. “He was wastin’ his time wi’ those Steven Seagal movies, wasn’t he? Knows his gowf and his Bhagavad-Gita both. Fairly brings Bobby and the Haig back in the flesh, Mr. Pressfield does, and the great sportswriters, too--Grantland Rice and O.B. Keeler.”

But is this novel merely a spin-off of “Golf in the Kingdom”?

“Ye canna compare ‘em,” Irons said. “ ‘Bagger Vance’ is plotted all the way through. ‘Kingdom’ was mixed in wi’ Mr. Murphy’s own life story and wi’ philosophical essayin’. It had nae boundaries. What was true, what was fiction? It kept ye guessin’. It was a New Age book written in time o’ war that teased us with new possibilities.

“My own gowf teacher, Seamus MacDuff, and I were God-seekers, gifted but fallible, mind ye. Bagger Vance is God. Nae less. And Junah might be Jonah, or Job, the way Vance’s teachin’ blasts and blinds him. Like a full St. Andrews gale, the force o’ that teachin’ blows all the characters flat; they canna resist. It’s a sermon written in time o’ peace that harks back to the virtues o’ the warrior.

“ ‘Gowf and the Game o’ Life’--that’s Mr. Pressfield’s subtitle, and Seamus or I might have made some such comparison in Mr. Murphy’s hearin’ when we had a drink or two in us, Lord knows. And it’s true. As long as ye dinna harp on it too much. That’s the trouble with you Yanks. Because first and foremost, gowf is a game.”