Gunpowder Plots

DYNASTY or DEATH--Taylor Caldwell--Scribner ($2.75).

George and Joseph Barbour were English-born brothers who, in a Pennsylvania industrial town in 1837, formed a partnership for the manufacture of gunpowder. As they shook hands on their bargain, a storm broke and ''there came such a flare of lightning, such a bellow of thunder, that the very earth shuddered. . . ." This was not the only occasion on which the heavens collaborated in the Barbours' emotional crises. Through the 797 pages of Dynasty of Death, a novel recounting their rise to the ranks of great munitions makers, drenching rains accompany the partings of lovers, snow falls on deathbed scenes, sleet blows when a partner is betrayed, leaden skies prevail during a period of anxious waiting, and sparkling summer weather contributes so much assistance to love scenes that they sometimes read more like weather than passion reports.

If there were no more thunderstorms after George and Joseph's meteorological handshake, it may well have been because few Barbours felt any call to shake hands after that. Joseph's older son, the implacable, unscrupulous Ernest, soon squeezed out Uncle George, with his father's assistance. Then he pushed his father into the background. Martin, the second son, sensitive, mystical, intuitive, disapproved of the armaments industry, died in the Civil War, but not before he had left children to confuse things in the next generation. Ernest's children turned out badly: Godfrey became a composer, Guy was killed by Martin's son during a strike, the others showed no aptitude for business. Hardhearted Ernest lived on, fomented wars, carried on a love affair with Martin's widow. When his daughter fell in love with a religious-minded cousin, Ernest neatly got rid of the suitor. He bribed a bishop to persuade the young man that marriage to his cousin would be sacrilege. The plot worked, except that his daughter, marrying the man he had picked for her (on a cold, sleety, winter night) wasted away and died. Cumbersome and old-fashioned as Dynasty of Death is, Ernest is a figure of such monumental villainy that readers who begin by considering him unbelievable may end by considering him interesting, even a little likable.

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