Creatures of the Kingdom by James A Michener Mandarin $85 AGAINST all logic, perhaps, James A Michener is an author beloved by millions, as his sales figures prove. His prose is lush and he can pack more cliches into two inches of type than anyone except Barbara Cartland. Michener did not even start writing until he was 40. He has produced many blockbusters which have affected a generation or more.
He is known best and most affectionately for his very first book Tales of the South Pacific inspired by his wartime service among those glorious islands and which in turn inspired the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific.
He followed that up with a whole series of best-sellers. The man cannot be hard up, which makes this latest product all the more inexplicable. He must have an eager agent.
This is nothing more than a collection of a dozen and a half pot-boiler magazine articles, published over goodness knows how many years about the lives of animals, as Michener imagines them.
If you have a fancy for gross anthropomorphism, then this is the book for you. One story deals with a long-extinct bison. We are told about his intricate thought processes, his ''sheer joy' in the herd and how he ''loved the smell of combat''. Presumably Michener was told all this by one of the present-day breeds.
But who told Michener about the mating of Diplodocus the dinosaur? Whoever it was, had an eye for grace: ''How beautiful she was as she moved through the growing darkness''.