It's a Bird! It's a Dream! It's Supergull!

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version of Jonathan. The paperback rights have been sold to Avon for a cool $1.1 million—another record. People are beginning to compare Jonathan to Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince and Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet (favorably or not, according to taste) as a book likely to stay around forever. Says Bach, who does not exactly take Jonathan's commercial success with clench-jawed seriousness: "The way I figure, just by April 1975, the whole earth will be covered about two feet deep in copies of Jonathan L. Seagull." The question that itches away at all but the most ecstatic readers—and haunts the clever folk in publishing who turned the damned thing down—is why?

Jonathan occasionally sounds like a Boy Scout leader, a jet-fighter pilot and St. Paul, but, at least in Part 1, he is really just the gull next door. He yearns to learn to fly better and faster than any other gull. His mother urges him to act like the other gulls and eat better ("Son, you're bone and feathers!"). His father tells him that life is hard. Jonathan can't help himself. He keeps practicing highspeed dives but fails to pull out properly because of his long wings. Temporarily, he gives up: "I am a seagull. I am limited by my nature. If I were meant to fly at speed, I'd have a falcon's short wings." A falcon's short wings! Light bulb! Jonathan dives with partly folded wings, hits 214 m.p.h. ("terminal velocity") and pulls out safely.

An incredible breakthrough. But the Flock is blind to the bright future Jonathan has opened to knowledge and perfect flight. They cast him out. Alone now, Jonathan improves his flying-night navigation, slow rolls, loops, the gull bunt. Eventually two radiant gulls who can fly precise formation with him appear and take him to what he (and the reader) at first thinks is heaven.

You Are Free. Studying up there with gulls named Sullivan and Chiang, Jonathan carries his quest for the joy of perfection to unimaginable flight skills and speeds. He finally learns to move from here to there instantly, just by thinking of it. He also learns that there is no heaven and no death. Existence is simply an infinite possibility of self-perfection through many different levels of consciousness. When he wonders why there are so few gulls at this level, he gets a heavy message from Sullivan. Unlike Jonathan, most gulls are interested only in eating, and so do not progress. "Learn nothing," says Sullivan, "and the next world is the same as this one, all the same limitations and lead weights to overcome." Unwilling to abandon the Flock for this elitist salvation, Jonathan goes back to his old level and acquires seven flying disciples. Despite the old ban by the Elders in the Flock, he acquires more would-be acrobatic candidates. One has a crippled wing, but Jonathan says: "You have the freedom to be yourself, your true self, here and now, and nothing can stand in your way. It is the Law of the Great Gull."

"Are you saying I can fly?" squeaks poor little Maynard Gull.

"I say you are free," says Jonathan. Maynard flies. The Flock talks of miracles and says that Jonathan is the son of the Great Gull himself. Jonathan is distressed. It is only the idea of perfection that has done the work. Then Jonathan leaves, counseling his disciples to love the