Archebiosis

THE NOISE OF THEIR WINGS--MacKinlay Kantor--Coward-McCann ($2.50).

In all ages, men's imaginations have been stirred by the flight of birds. No more dramatic flights have been recorded than those of the pastel-colored passenger pigeons--Audubon guessed a billion in one flock--which once streamed across U. S. skies. The speed with which they were slaughtered was no less fabulous than their flights. (In New York, says one report, 40 boatloads went begging at one cent a pigeon, were finally thrown to the hogs.) The last passenger pigeon died in the Cincinnati zoo in 1914. It now perches behind glass in the Smithsonian Institution --an exquisitely poised, apricot-breasted model for some future monument to vanished U. S. frontiers, squandered U. S. resources.

The painful lore of the passenger pigeons deserves a poet but has attracted MacKinlay Kantor. The Noise of Their Wings, laid in Florida of 1937, revolves around the obsession of an aged millionaire, who hankers for a living pair of passenger pigeons. The main role, however, devolves on the millionaire's old friend, an ornithologist, who is Author Kantor's poetic mouthpiece. In a series of melodramatic disasters which involve half the main characters, as well as all the pigeons, the ornithologist is everywhere at once, confirming his mystical foreboding that no good can come of the millionaire's fanaticism, that "this entire historic enterprise had become archebiosis--the science of making living matter out of the dead."

Author Kantor's story is teasing and ingenious rather than effective. As in his Civil War novels (Long Remember, Arouse and Beware, etc.), MacKinlay Kantor has a graphic sense of the U. S. past, writes good descriptive narrative, and creates an atmosphere of tension. But in The Noise of Their Wings he goes lame shuttling between the past and present, and most of his vitality appears to have been exhausted in devising a modern plot. The characters in The Noise of Their Wings resemble real people about as closely as the Smithsonian's well-stuffed passenger pigeon resembles a living dove in Hight.

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