[...]

The point of this satirical ploy is presumably, in part, the very fact that here the forces of aggression and barbarism are not "hawks" but doves-the dove normally being thought of as a symbol of peace. Evil erupts where one least expects it and is least able to defend oneself against it. Yet Parti Nagy imputes a further sense, which derives from the ring-dove or wood pigeon (Columba palumbus) being the Columbid species that, having adapted to the nuisances of our civilization, now infests so many cities: they are the lumpenproletariat, the urban scum who, in no time at all, proliferate everywhere and befoul everything. It is pigeons of this sort that the novel's main protagonist and first-person narrator-a writer who bears a more than passing resemblance to the author-comes up against as he drifts from one rented apartment to another. On account of a bizarre short story that the writer has published, he is sought out by Caesar Tubica (Squab), a ringleader and Top Breed Vice-President in the Palumbist Life Movement, whose loft dwelling upstairs in the same building serves as a meeting-place for pigeon activists. The story, which the writer himself had supposed to be an innocuous product of his imagination, turns out to contain information that the movement deems important for its concerns with growth hormones, genetic manipulation, organ transplantation, and the production of racial hybrids-all aimed at pumping up the pigeons to a size bigger than they actually are. Slight in external appearance he may be, but otherwise bestowed-in a Swiftian or Orwellian manner-with human attributes, and thus speaking in a human voice and generally behaving in a thoroughly human or, to be more precise, Aryan and top-breed-brotherly fashion, the menacing figure of Tubica is certain that the writer, however much he may deny it, is one and the same as the short-story hero from whom the movement wish to learn certain key facts that have a major bearing on the secrets of growth. Tubica proposes a voluntary collaboration, otherwise "the organization has its interrogation officers trained in Uganda, if I catch his drift, and they don't exactly used gloved hands to get someone to spill the beans, no sirree!"

Thoroughly intimidated, the writer moves to another apartment, however, just when he thinks he has shaken off his nightmarish visitor, he receives an e-mail message, which proves to be the first in a regular succession of such missives. He himself is sending the communications to himself, or in other words-to use the conventional literary term-to his alter ego or, from yet another viewpoint, his hero. He had taken this hero to be a mere literary fiction, but-lo and behold!-he is a live and kicking being whom the Palumbists have abducted and surgically reassigned to their race, because they identify with him and wish to incorporate him, literally, into their movement. Through the e-mails, the writer follows and comments with growing horror on what proves to be an all-too-real schizophrenic hallucination of the mental and physical metamorphosis undergone by his alter ego as-initially under protest and at the cost of no little pain, but in time increasingly compliantly and eventually turning it actively to his own careerist advantage-he is fitted with wings and gradually shrunk in size. For the time being the writer himself, insofar as he is capable of distinguishing himself from the alter ego, is safe, but the moment soon arrives when he comprehends that his hero, now a Palumbist activist and the only one who knows his whereabouts, is the very person who will bring about his destruction.

[...]

Miklós Györffy
reviews new fiction for this journal.