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The Flight of the Falcon
Master storyteller Daphne du Maurier, bestselling author of Rebecca, conjures a chilling tale in which the line between good and evil is blurred and suspicions run rampant. An ever-charming Italian courier, Armino Fabbio finds his life wildly shaken up when a mysterious murder compels him to return to his birthplace Ruffano to investigate the victim's identity.
Haunted by its violent past and a sinister former duke known as The Falcon, his home is embroiled in scandal and unrest as justice is sought in deadly ways. At the center of the controversy is someone Armino never could have fathomed, pulling him into the heart of the conflict and revealing dark family secrets and the true selves of those closest to him.
Haunted by its violent past and a sinister former duke known as The Falcon, his home is embroiled in scandal and unrest as justice is sought in deadly ways. At the center of the controversy is someone Armino never could have fathomed, pulling him into the heart of the conflict and revealing dark family secrets and the true selves of those closest to him.
368 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1965
132 people are currently reading
3238 people want to read
About the author
Daphne du Maurier
472 books9,846 followersDaphne du Maurier was born on 13 May 1907 at 24 Cumberland Terrace, Regent's Park, London, the middle of three daughters of prominent actor-manager Sir Gerald du Maurier and actress Muriel, née Beaumont. In many ways her life resembles a fairy tale. Born into a family with a rich artistic and historical background, her paternal grandfather was author and Punch cartoonist George du Maurier, who created the character of Svengali in the 1894 novel Trilby, and her mother was a maternal niece of journalist, author, and lecturer Comyns Beaumont. She and her sisters were indulged as a children and grew up enjoying enormous freedom from financial and parental restraint. Her elder sister, Angela du Maurier, also became a writer, and her younger sister Jeanne was a painter.
She spent her youth sailing boats, travelling on the Continent with friends, and writing stories. Her family connections helped her establish her literary career, and she published some of her early work in Beaumont's Bystander magazine. A prestigious publishing house accepted her first novel when she was in her early twenties, and its publication brought her not only fame but the attentions of a handsome soldier, Major (later Lieutenant-General Sir) Frederick Browning, whom she married.
She continued writing under her maiden name, and her subsequent novels became bestsellers, earning her enormous wealth and fame. Many have been successfully adapted into films, including the novels Rebecca, Frenchman's Creek, My Cousin Rachel, and Jamaica Inn, and the short stories The Birds and Don't Look Now/Not After Midnight. While Alfred Hitchcock's films based upon her novels proceeded to make her one of the best-known authors in the world, she enjoyed the life of a fairy princess in a mansion in Cornwall called Menabilly, which served as the model for Manderley in Rebecca.
Daphne du Maurier was obsessed with the past. She intensively researched the lives of Francis and Anthony Bacon, the history of Cornwall, the Regency period, and nineteenth-century France and England. Above all, however, she was obsessed with her own family history, which she chronicled in Gerald: A Portrait, a biography of her father; The du Mauriers, a study of her family which focused on her grandfather, George du Maurier, the novelist and illustrator for Punch; The Glassblowers, a novel based upon the lives of her du Maurier ancestors; and Growing Pains, an autobiography that ignores nearly 50 years of her life in favour of the joyful and more romantic period of her youth. Daphne du Maurier can best be understood in terms of her remarkable and paradoxical family, the ghosts which haunted her life and fiction.
While contemporary writers were dealing critically with such subjects as the war, alienation, religion, poverty, Marxism, psychology and art, and experimenting with new techniques such as the stream of consciousness, du Maurier produced 'old-fashioned' novels with straightforward narratives that appealed to a popular audience's love of fantasy, adventure, sexuality and mystery. At an early age, she recognised that her readership was comprised principally of women, and she cultivated their loyal following through several decades by embodying their desires and dreams in her novels and short stories.
In some of her novels, however, she went beyond the technique of the formulaic romance to achieve a powerful psychological realism reflecting her intense feelings about her father, and to a lesser degree, her mother. This vision, which underlies Julius, Rebecca and The Parasites, is that of an author overwhelmed by the memory of her father's commanding presence. In Julius and The Parasites, for example, she introduces the image of a domineering but deadly father and the daring subject of incest.
In Rebecca, on the other hand, du Maurier fuses psychological realism with a sophisticated version of the Cinderella story.
She spent her youth sailing boats, travelling on the Continent with friends, and writing stories. Her family connections helped her establish her literary career, and she published some of her early work in Beaumont's Bystander magazine. A prestigious publishing house accepted her first novel when she was in her early twenties, and its publication brought her not only fame but the attentions of a handsome soldier, Major (later Lieutenant-General Sir) Frederick Browning, whom she married.
She continued writing under her maiden name, and her subsequent novels became bestsellers, earning her enormous wealth and fame. Many have been successfully adapted into films, including the novels Rebecca, Frenchman's Creek, My Cousin Rachel, and Jamaica Inn, and the short stories The Birds and Don't Look Now/Not After Midnight. While Alfred Hitchcock's films based upon her novels proceeded to make her one of the best-known authors in the world, she enjoyed the life of a fairy princess in a mansion in Cornwall called Menabilly, which served as the model for Manderley in Rebecca.
Daphne du Maurier was obsessed with the past. She intensively researched the lives of Francis and Anthony Bacon, the history of Cornwall, the Regency period, and nineteenth-century France and England. Above all, however, she was obsessed with her own family history, which she chronicled in Gerald: A Portrait, a biography of her father; The du Mauriers, a study of her family which focused on her grandfather, George du Maurier, the novelist and illustrator for Punch; The Glassblowers, a novel based upon the lives of her du Maurier ancestors; and Growing Pains, an autobiography that ignores nearly 50 years of her life in favour of the joyful and more romantic period of her youth. Daphne du Maurier can best be understood in terms of her remarkable and paradoxical family, the ghosts which haunted her life and fiction.
While contemporary writers were dealing critically with such subjects as the war, alienation, religion, poverty, Marxism, psychology and art, and experimenting with new techniques such as the stream of consciousness, du Maurier produced 'old-fashioned' novels with straightforward narratives that appealed to a popular audience's love of fantasy, adventure, sexuality and mystery. At an early age, she recognised that her readership was comprised principally of women, and she cultivated their loyal following through several decades by embodying their desires and dreams in her novels and short stories.
In some of her novels, however, she went beyond the technique of the formulaic romance to achieve a powerful psychological realism reflecting her intense feelings about her father, and to a lesser degree, her mother. This vision, which underlies Julius, Rebecca and The Parasites, is that of an author overwhelmed by the memory of her father's commanding presence. In Julius and The Parasites, for example, she introduces the image of a domineering but deadly father and the daring subject of incest.
In Rebecca, on the other hand, du Maurier fuses psychological realism with a sophisticated version of the Cinderella story.
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February 5, 2025
The Flight of the Falcon is an all but forgotten masterpiece, a late novel written in 1965 by Daphne du Maurier. Most critics never seem to have attempted to get beyond its superficial mystery story. The New Yorker called it “extraordinarily dull”, and it was not even mentioned in her obituary in “The Times”. Yet it is quite an extraordinary piece of writing, not my personal favourite, but her most ambitious and perhaps her greatest novel, comparable with one by Iris Murdoch. I come away feeling that I have only explored the surface of this deep, dark novel.
So why has it been so neglected? I suspect the answer is simple. It is not what her audience expected, or wanted. Stories redolent with intrigue and romance such as “Jamaica Inn” and “Frenchman’s Creek”, tended to attract a huge audience, of readers who wanted more of the same. But The Flight of the Falcon is a novel replete with layers of meaning, with religious and mythic significance. It is an allegory, exploring concepts of good and evil, predestination, sacrifice, and the essence of the human spirit, set against a backdrop of family secrets, murder, rape and incest, and brooding political unrest. In part it is a brutal and twisted tale of malevolence:
“When accusation were made against him by the outraged citizens of Ruffano, Duke Claudio retaliated by declaring that he had been divinely appointed to mete out to his subjects the punishment they deserved. The proud would be stripped, the haughty violated, the slandered silenced, the viper die in his venom. The scales of heavenly justice would thus be balanced.”
Powerful stuff from a writer who was commonly thought to write “romantic fiction” — a view which Daphne du Maurier herself deplored. With The Flight of the Falcon she told with great conviction, how this excerpt from an imaginary ancient German text, “Lives of the Dukes of Ruffano” had resonance through the ages, serving as a template for current events.
In “The Rebecca Notebook: and Other Memories”, Daphne du Maurier stated:
“All childhood memories are visual. A face, a figure, somebody smiling or frowning, and the image stays forever. A moment in time, held captive”
This also informs every step of The Flight of the Falcon.
The novel hinges on two Renaissance paintings, which have haunted the narrator, Armino Donati, all his life. Partly this is due to his own imagination, and partly due to the forceful personality of his elder brother, Aldo. The two works of art, the “Raising of Lazarus” and the “Temptation of Christ”, an altarpiece in the San Cipriano chapel, become metaphors for the events which follow.
Yet the novel starts out simply, with a jokey exchange between two ordinary men following their daily routine jobs. Armino Fabbio, is a jaded and cynical courier, a tour guide for “Sunshine Tours”. At almost 32 he barely tolerates his monotonous job, ferrying the “beef and barbarians” (his words for English and American tourists respectively) who come to tour Italy, visiting Genoa, Rome and Milan. He remains polite at all times, though it is clear that he despises those to whom he shows respect. Armino feels unfulfilled, trapped in a worthless daily grind.
At the beginning of the story, staying with his party at the “Hotel Splendido” he has a chance encounter with a poor old peasant woman, very ill and humped in the doorway of the church of San Capriano. She appears to be seeking sanctuary. He has a sudden flash of déjà vu:
“that bowed posture, the ample drapery spread, the arms folded, the head buried under the weight of shawls”
Something about her position and attitude reminds him of his childhood home, the ducal palace in Ruffano. He is provoked into action, planning to liberate himself from his self-imposed routine. Filled with memories, Armino dreams all night of his childhood home — and most of all of his elder brother, Aldo.
Aldo used to force Armino, or “Beo” as he was then known, to join in a role-playing game, acting out the story of Lazarus. He brought the painting vividly and horrifying to life in the young boy’s mind, swaddling Beo in his father’s dirty night-shirt from the laundry basket and bundling him into the linen closet, which represented Lazarus’s tomb-like cave. Beo would then have to wait for Aldo’s voice, as he represented Christ, beckoning him out:
“The handle of the closet turned. The door softly opened. Aldo cried, “Lazarus, come forth!”
So great was my dread, so disciplined to his commands my spirit, that I dared not disobey. I came forth, and the horror was that I did not know whether I should meet with the Christ or with the Devil, for according to Aldo’s ingenious theory the two were one, and also, in some manner which he never explained, interchangeable.” *
Thus Aldo used manipulation and mental torture on his young brother, who feared and idolised him in equal measure. He also used to terrify little Beo with stories about “the Falcon”:
“His arms were wings, he had become a bird. He soared over the rooftops and the city that was his, and the people stared up at him in wonder.”
Yet Beo knew — his father, Superintendent Donati, had told him — that the cruel Duke had thrown himself from the highest tower and been killed.
However little Beo was no more. Beo was no longer “Il Beato, the blessed one”, and Mrs Donati had married a kindly American, and become Mrs Fabbio. Everyone of significance in his life was long gone now. Even little Beo had faded away, becoming subsumed into Mr Armino Fabbio. But the memories remained, as potent as ever.
Armino’s brother Aldo became a pilot, but was shot down in flames and killed in 1943, during World War II. Armino was carted around several countries by his mother, whom he says had friendships with various gentlemen. She initially left Ruffano as the mistress of a Nazi Commandant, and followed this by a spell living with an American Brigadier in Frankfurt, and finally a kindly bank manager in Turin, Enrico Fabbio, who gave Armino his name. He categorises his mother dismissively as a “whore”.
The woman in the church doorway preys on his mind, and he goes back to give her some money. She turns to thank him, and Armino is mortified to see that she looks like Marta, his childhood nurse. In panic he flees, only to find that his problems are compounded the next day when he learns that she has been murdered. Is this his responsibility? And how did she ever come to be in this position, a sad alcoholic, with no place to lay her head? He determines to return to his childhood home, to try to discover what had happened. By the end of chapter two, we are enmeshed in this story of intrigue, which rapidly begins to escalate. Skeletons begin to emerge from the past.
Armino arranges events so that he can return to Ruffano anonymously, claiming to be resident in Turin. There he finds the town has changed. The small university of his childhood has expanded, and the university is now the focus of the city. Ruffano is full of students zooming round on their Vespa motor scooters. These students are deeply divided. The Commerce and Economics department is set against the Arts department, and in a warped fashion, violence between the opposing factions seems to be positively encouraged by some senior members of the University. Installed in Armino’s former home is the Rector of the University, Signor Butali, and his wife. The Rector is the one person who might have been able to stay the aggression, but he is away from home, and ill. Armino is staying in temporary accommodation, and through a chance new acquaintance, Carla Raspa, he is given a temporary position in the University library.
An annual festival is fast approaching, when over a day, an historical event will be renacted by the students. For the past three years this has been orchestrated by the Director of the Arts Council, a much-respected and charismatic man. He seems to have chosen a strange theme for the pageant: “The Flight of the Falcon”, about the insane Duke Claudio, who, believing himself a deity, judged and punished the sins of the people of Ruffano. Despite the two stories Beo had been told, the adult Armino learns the historical facts about Duke Claudio, through his access to the original documents. He is filled with foreboding as he notes the similarity between the events of the early fifteenth century, and what may happen in Ruffano.
Armino meets many people he recognises from his past, as well as encountering new ones, and is often shocked by the toll life has taken on those he knew as a child. Nobody recognises “little Beo” in Mr Fabbio, athough he is still very small in stature, only 5'5".
The latest brain research seems to indicate that when we remember something, we actually recreate the experience anew in the brain. This is why sometimes we have “false memories”, when we may be conflating different experiences we have had, thereby creating a new “memory”. The psychologist James Hillman suggests these images at first seem to be:
“hallucinations (things seen); then one recognises them as acts of subjective imagining; but then, third, comes the awareness that images are independent of subjectivity and even of the imagination itself as a mental activity.”
In a similar way, Daphne du Maurier explores the significance and origin of images and the imagination all through this novel. James Hillman said that any images relating to demons or devils seem to possess:
“prior knowledge (coded information) and an instinctive direction for a destiny, as if prophetic, prognostic.”
And in the novel, Armino himself questions whether this is:
“chance or predestination? … the scientists could not tell us. Nor could the psychologists, or the priests.”
As we learn more and more, we learn the mysterious workings of a secret society, complete with costumes and macabre rituals. There are twelve disciples, all convinced that through their strange twisted moral code they are administering justice, and purging their victims of their sins. These twelve also function as “Lost Boys”, with an archetypal Peter Pan at their helm. Every one of them has been rescued from horror and strife in World War II, and naturally each one is completely devoted and loyal to their leader as a result. Daphne du Maurier’s cousins, interestingly, were the Llewelyn Davies boys, who provided the inspiration for J.M. Barrie’s play “Peter Pan; or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up”.
Emotions are deliberately whipped up through a series of brutal and terrifying episodes. Armino is offered a part in the pageant, but he becomes increasingly concerned that it will result in bloodshed. It is over five hundred years since the sinister Duke Claudio, “The Falcon”, lived his sadistic life of debauchery, preying on the town people of Ruffano. Yet one character is determined to recreate some of this history, and as the novel proceeds with violent death and symbolic acts, the parallels between the present day and Duke Claudio’s cruel regime become more manifest.
The novel is suffused with a great sense of menace and foreboding. Although events are shrouded in mystery, because of the skilful way the story is told, it is possible to deduce certain facts. Why are there two entries in the same name in the register of births, just a few days apart? Why was the humped figure so familiar? Was it the semblance to a familiar religious statue? We even have a suspicion of a big revelation which comes at the tail end of the story . Yet this does not in any way impair the enjoyment for the reader. If anything, it increases the tension and sense of impending doom. The lines between good and evil are increasingly blurred. Identities are unclear, suspicion reigns supreme. There is scandal, intrigue and deep shame. Malice masquerades, as in the past, as divine justice. The atmosphere is gothic and heady.
It is not only Armino who is fearful of riots and a catastrophic outcome. We are too. Armino, the only one with full knowledge of all the facts, seems powerless to stop it. The last scene where is the only possible ending. It is fantastic and weird (in their proper senses). It is both devastating and heart-wrenchingly inevitable.
Ruffano is an actual place: a town in Southeast Italy. There is a church built in the 16th century, above an early cave church from the 12th century. A castle dating from 1626, “Castello Brancaccio”, overlooks the town. There is a Crucifix Crypt and a grotto “Grotta della Trinità” in use since Neolithic times, although by the 11th century it became a religious place, with remains of Byzantine frescoes.
There is a Greek word, “ekphrasis”, meaning to describe a work of art, either real or imagined, as a rhetorical exercise, exploring and explaining graphic works of art. This novel is a modern example of this ancient device. It is a kind of extended ekphrasis of the two Renaissance paintings, “Raising of Lazarus” and the “Temptation of Christ”. Other novels have also used this device. In Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” the beautiful young man Dorian Gray, is described as having “the perfection of the spirit that is Greek”. Yet as he becomes more and more debauched, his hideous and demonised self becomes manifest as the painting, and also in the title of the book itself.
Just as Dorian is haunted by his portrait, Armino Fabbio is also haunted by two graphic images: the paintings which have been overwhelmingly fixed in his imagination by the forceful personality of his elder brother Aldo. The two paintings are fictional, but probably based on Renaissance artwork found in the Ducal Palace at Urbino:
Daphne du Maurer was inspired by both this city and Ruffano. Her description of “Raising of Lazarus” could give anybody nightmares, never mind an impressionable boy with a manipulative and cruel brother.* The startling duality, and paradox is even clearer in the second painting, the “Temptation of Christ”, which showed showed Christ standing on the Temple pinnacle.* Later on Armino muses further on this painting:
“The tempter, Satan, was the same Christ in profile, suggesting, not a lack of models, but a rash attempt at truth. The portrait might have lost its power to terrify, but not to cause unease. I wondered that it had survived five centuries, to confound the vandals and to mock the Church. Today the tourist, with his eye upon his watch, the message missed, would pass it by unquestioning.”
Daphne du Maurier’s novels are palimpsests: they often contain meanings invisible to a casual reading. Her novels can be read as straightforward entertaining mysteries, but looking under the surface usually reveals much deeper significances. In The Flight of the Falcon, there are many references, images and hints of other myths and legends, as well as events from history. The story of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun is an obvious parallel and there are allusions to Hermes, an Olympian god, moving freely between mortals and the divine. He is portrayed as quick and cunning, and sometimes as a trickster. There is the Madonna, birth and divine rebirth, a recurring theme of womb-like caves and enclaves.
A decade earlier, Daphne du Maurier studied works by Carl Jung, about opposites in human nature: good and evil, lightness and darkness, and masculinity and femininity. Jung explored the dilemma of Christ and the Antichrist, citing the Gnostics, who:
“in contrast to the dismissive polarising of good and evil in the developing Christian Church, the Gnostics proclaimed that God includes the opposites, both darkness and light – that God is accountable for all of creation.”
Some symbols or allegories are used both to refer to Christ and also to the Devil. “Lucifer, the Morning Star”, means Christ as well as the Devil. There does not seem to be much about the Devil in the Old Testament. Some Judaeo Christians have even regarded Satan as Christ’s elder brother. In The Flight of the Falcon we have not one but two parallel sets of brothers - the twentieth century Aldo and Armino Donati and the sixteenth century Dukes, Claudio and Carlo. In both of these cases, it is the elder brother who holds the power over the younger,
In The Flight of the Falcon, interestingly, Daphne du Maurier also seems to combine Christ with the Devil, or the principle of good with the principle of evil. They are presented as two halves of the same coin. She also references the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche:
“‘Your German Commandant should have quoted Nietzsche to you … He who no longer finds what is great in God will find it nowhere; he must either deny it or create it’”
The character is quoting Nietzsche, who said that for the Ancient Greeks and Romans, “all things, whether good or bad, are deified”.
Daphne du Maurier herself viewed Greek mythology as heavily influencial. In her essay “Romantic Love”, she says:
“These stories, savage, brutal, utterly amoral, are the foundation of our literary culture. They spread from Greece to Rome and so throughout Europe … the birth of a heavenly son to a virgin has a curious similarity to the Greek myth preceding it.”
The good Christ then, could be shown to have his antecedent in an amoral mythology. Or perhaps everything comes back to predestination. The ending is deliberately ambiguous, leaving us with questions. Daphne du Maurier never wants to leave her readers entirely sure of the answer.
As Jung said:
“Perhaps – who knows? – these eternal images are what men mean by fate.”
So why has it been so neglected? I suspect the answer is simple. It is not what her audience expected, or wanted. Stories redolent with intrigue and romance such as “Jamaica Inn” and “Frenchman’s Creek”, tended to attract a huge audience, of readers who wanted more of the same. But The Flight of the Falcon is a novel replete with layers of meaning, with religious and mythic significance. It is an allegory, exploring concepts of good and evil, predestination, sacrifice, and the essence of the human spirit, set against a backdrop of family secrets, murder, rape and incest, and brooding political unrest. In part it is a brutal and twisted tale of malevolence:
“When accusation were made against him by the outraged citizens of Ruffano, Duke Claudio retaliated by declaring that he had been divinely appointed to mete out to his subjects the punishment they deserved. The proud would be stripped, the haughty violated, the slandered silenced, the viper die in his venom. The scales of heavenly justice would thus be balanced.”
Powerful stuff from a writer who was commonly thought to write “romantic fiction” — a view which Daphne du Maurier herself deplored. With The Flight of the Falcon she told with great conviction, how this excerpt from an imaginary ancient German text, “Lives of the Dukes of Ruffano” had resonance through the ages, serving as a template for current events.
In “The Rebecca Notebook: and Other Memories”, Daphne du Maurier stated:
“All childhood memories are visual. A face, a figure, somebody smiling or frowning, and the image stays forever. A moment in time, held captive”
This also informs every step of The Flight of the Falcon.
The novel hinges on two Renaissance paintings, which have haunted the narrator, Armino Donati, all his life. Partly this is due to his own imagination, and partly due to the forceful personality of his elder brother, Aldo. The two works of art, the “Raising of Lazarus” and the “Temptation of Christ”, an altarpiece in the San Cipriano chapel, become metaphors for the events which follow.
Yet the novel starts out simply, with a jokey exchange between two ordinary men following their daily routine jobs. Armino Fabbio, is a jaded and cynical courier, a tour guide for “Sunshine Tours”. At almost 32 he barely tolerates his monotonous job, ferrying the “beef and barbarians” (his words for English and American tourists respectively) who come to tour Italy, visiting Genoa, Rome and Milan. He remains polite at all times, though it is clear that he despises those to whom he shows respect. Armino feels unfulfilled, trapped in a worthless daily grind.
At the beginning of the story, staying with his party at the “Hotel Splendido” he has a chance encounter with a poor old peasant woman, very ill and humped in the doorway of the church of San Capriano. She appears to be seeking sanctuary. He has a sudden flash of déjà vu:
“that bowed posture, the ample drapery spread, the arms folded, the head buried under the weight of shawls”
Something about her position and attitude reminds him of his childhood home, the ducal palace in Ruffano. He is provoked into action, planning to liberate himself from his self-imposed routine. Filled with memories, Armino dreams all night of his childhood home — and most of all of his elder brother, Aldo.
Aldo used to force Armino, or “Beo” as he was then known, to join in a role-playing game, acting out the story of Lazarus. He brought the painting vividly and horrifying to life in the young boy’s mind, swaddling Beo in his father’s dirty night-shirt from the laundry basket and bundling him into the linen closet, which represented Lazarus’s tomb-like cave. Beo would then have to wait for Aldo’s voice, as he represented Christ, beckoning him out:
“The handle of the closet turned. The door softly opened. Aldo cried, “Lazarus, come forth!”
So great was my dread, so disciplined to his commands my spirit, that I dared not disobey. I came forth, and the horror was that I did not know whether I should meet with the Christ or with the Devil, for according to Aldo’s ingenious theory the two were one, and also, in some manner which he never explained, interchangeable.” *
Thus Aldo used manipulation and mental torture on his young brother, who feared and idolised him in equal measure. He also used to terrify little Beo with stories about “the Falcon”:
“His arms were wings, he had become a bird. He soared over the rooftops and the city that was his, and the people stared up at him in wonder.”
Yet Beo knew — his father, Superintendent Donati, had told him — that the cruel Duke had thrown himself from the highest tower and been killed.
However little Beo was no more. Beo was no longer “Il Beato, the blessed one”, and Mrs Donati had married a kindly American, and become Mrs Fabbio. Everyone of significance in his life was long gone now. Even little Beo had faded away, becoming subsumed into Mr Armino Fabbio. But the memories remained, as potent as ever.
Armino’s brother Aldo became a pilot, but was shot down in flames and killed in 1943, during World War II. Armino was carted around several countries by his mother, whom he says had friendships with various gentlemen. She initially left Ruffano as the mistress of a Nazi Commandant, and followed this by a spell living with an American Brigadier in Frankfurt, and finally a kindly bank manager in Turin, Enrico Fabbio, who gave Armino his name. He categorises his mother dismissively as a “whore”.
The woman in the church doorway preys on his mind, and he goes back to give her some money. She turns to thank him, and Armino is mortified to see that she looks like Marta, his childhood nurse. In panic he flees, only to find that his problems are compounded the next day when he learns that she has been murdered. Is this his responsibility? And how did she ever come to be in this position, a sad alcoholic, with no place to lay her head? He determines to return to his childhood home, to try to discover what had happened. By the end of chapter two, we are enmeshed in this story of intrigue, which rapidly begins to escalate. Skeletons begin to emerge from the past.
Armino arranges events so that he can return to Ruffano anonymously, claiming to be resident in Turin. There he finds the town has changed. The small university of his childhood has expanded, and the university is now the focus of the city. Ruffano is full of students zooming round on their Vespa motor scooters. These students are deeply divided. The Commerce and Economics department is set against the Arts department, and in a warped fashion, violence between the opposing factions seems to be positively encouraged by some senior members of the University. Installed in Armino’s former home is the Rector of the University, Signor Butali, and his wife. The Rector is the one person who might have been able to stay the aggression, but he is away from home, and ill. Armino is staying in temporary accommodation, and through a chance new acquaintance, Carla Raspa, he is given a temporary position in the University library.
An annual festival is fast approaching, when over a day, an historical event will be renacted by the students. For the past three years this has been orchestrated by the Director of the Arts Council, a much-respected and charismatic man. He seems to have chosen a strange theme for the pageant: “The Flight of the Falcon”, about the insane Duke Claudio, who, believing himself a deity, judged and punished the sins of the people of Ruffano. Despite the two stories Beo had been told, the adult Armino learns the historical facts about Duke Claudio, through his access to the original documents. He is filled with foreboding as he notes the similarity between the events of the early fifteenth century, and what may happen in Ruffano.
Armino meets many people he recognises from his past, as well as encountering new ones, and is often shocked by the toll life has taken on those he knew as a child. Nobody recognises “little Beo” in Mr Fabbio, athough he is still very small in stature, only 5'5".
The latest brain research seems to indicate that when we remember something, we actually recreate the experience anew in the brain. This is why sometimes we have “false memories”, when we may be conflating different experiences we have had, thereby creating a new “memory”. The psychologist James Hillman suggests these images at first seem to be:
“hallucinations (things seen); then one recognises them as acts of subjective imagining; but then, third, comes the awareness that images are independent of subjectivity and even of the imagination itself as a mental activity.”
In a similar way, Daphne du Maurier explores the significance and origin of images and the imagination all through this novel. James Hillman said that any images relating to demons or devils seem to possess:
“prior knowledge (coded information) and an instinctive direction for a destiny, as if prophetic, prognostic.”
And in the novel, Armino himself questions whether this is:
“chance or predestination? … the scientists could not tell us. Nor could the psychologists, or the priests.”
As we learn more and more, we learn the mysterious workings of a secret society, complete with costumes and macabre rituals. There are twelve disciples, all convinced that through their strange twisted moral code they are administering justice, and purging their victims of their sins. These twelve also function as “Lost Boys”, with an archetypal Peter Pan at their helm. Every one of them has been rescued from horror and strife in World War II, and naturally each one is completely devoted and loyal to their leader as a result. Daphne du Maurier’s cousins, interestingly, were the Llewelyn Davies boys, who provided the inspiration for J.M. Barrie’s play “Peter Pan; or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up”.
Emotions are deliberately whipped up through a series of brutal and terrifying episodes. Armino is offered a part in the pageant, but he becomes increasingly concerned that it will result in bloodshed. It is over five hundred years since the sinister Duke Claudio, “The Falcon”, lived his sadistic life of debauchery, preying on the town people of Ruffano. Yet one character is determined to recreate some of this history, and as the novel proceeds with violent death and symbolic acts, the parallels between the present day and Duke Claudio’s cruel regime become more manifest.
The novel is suffused with a great sense of menace and foreboding. Although events are shrouded in mystery, because of the skilful way the story is told, it is possible to deduce certain facts. Why are there two entries in the same name in the register of births, just a few days apart? Why was the humped figure so familiar? Was it the semblance to a familiar religious statue? We even have a suspicion of a big revelation which comes at the tail end of the story . Yet this does not in any way impair the enjoyment for the reader. If anything, it increases the tension and sense of impending doom. The lines between good and evil are increasingly blurred. Identities are unclear, suspicion reigns supreme. There is scandal, intrigue and deep shame. Malice masquerades, as in the past, as divine justice. The atmosphere is gothic and heady.
It is not only Armino who is fearful of riots and a catastrophic outcome. We are too. Armino, the only one with full knowledge of all the facts, seems powerless to stop it. The last scene where is the only possible ending. It is fantastic and weird (in their proper senses). It is both devastating and heart-wrenchingly inevitable.
Ruffano is an actual place: a town in Southeast Italy. There is a church built in the 16th century, above an early cave church from the 12th century. A castle dating from 1626, “Castello Brancaccio”, overlooks the town. There is a Crucifix Crypt and a grotto “Grotta della Trinità” in use since Neolithic times, although by the 11th century it became a religious place, with remains of Byzantine frescoes.
There is a Greek word, “ekphrasis”, meaning to describe a work of art, either real or imagined, as a rhetorical exercise, exploring and explaining graphic works of art. This novel is a modern example of this ancient device. It is a kind of extended ekphrasis of the two Renaissance paintings, “Raising of Lazarus” and the “Temptation of Christ”. Other novels have also used this device. In Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” the beautiful young man Dorian Gray, is described as having “the perfection of the spirit that is Greek”. Yet as he becomes more and more debauched, his hideous and demonised self becomes manifest as the painting, and also in the title of the book itself.
Just as Dorian is haunted by his portrait, Armino Fabbio is also haunted by two graphic images: the paintings which have been overwhelmingly fixed in his imagination by the forceful personality of his elder brother Aldo. The two paintings are fictional, but probably based on Renaissance artwork found in the Ducal Palace at Urbino:
Daphne du Maurer was inspired by both this city and Ruffano. Her description of “Raising of Lazarus” could give anybody nightmares, never mind an impressionable boy with a manipulative and cruel brother.* The startling duality, and paradox is even clearer in the second painting, the “Temptation of Christ”, which showed showed Christ standing on the Temple pinnacle.* Later on Armino muses further on this painting:
“The tempter, Satan, was the same Christ in profile, suggesting, not a lack of models, but a rash attempt at truth. The portrait might have lost its power to terrify, but not to cause unease. I wondered that it had survived five centuries, to confound the vandals and to mock the Church. Today the tourist, with his eye upon his watch, the message missed, would pass it by unquestioning.”
Daphne du Maurier’s novels are palimpsests: they often contain meanings invisible to a casual reading. Her novels can be read as straightforward entertaining mysteries, but looking under the surface usually reveals much deeper significances. In The Flight of the Falcon, there are many references, images and hints of other myths and legends, as well as events from history. The story of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun is an obvious parallel and there are allusions to Hermes, an Olympian god, moving freely between mortals and the divine. He is portrayed as quick and cunning, and sometimes as a trickster. There is the Madonna, birth and divine rebirth, a recurring theme of womb-like caves and enclaves.
A decade earlier, Daphne du Maurier studied works by Carl Jung, about opposites in human nature: good and evil, lightness and darkness, and masculinity and femininity. Jung explored the dilemma of Christ and the Antichrist, citing the Gnostics, who:
“in contrast to the dismissive polarising of good and evil in the developing Christian Church, the Gnostics proclaimed that God includes the opposites, both darkness and light – that God is accountable for all of creation.”
Some symbols or allegories are used both to refer to Christ and also to the Devil. “Lucifer, the Morning Star”, means Christ as well as the Devil. There does not seem to be much about the Devil in the Old Testament. Some Judaeo Christians have even regarded Satan as Christ’s elder brother. In The Flight of the Falcon we have not one but two parallel sets of brothers - the twentieth century Aldo and Armino Donati and the sixteenth century Dukes, Claudio and Carlo. In both of these cases, it is the elder brother who holds the power over the younger,
In The Flight of the Falcon, interestingly, Daphne du Maurier also seems to combine Christ with the Devil, or the principle of good with the principle of evil. They are presented as two halves of the same coin. She also references the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche:
“‘Your German Commandant should have quoted Nietzsche to you … He who no longer finds what is great in God will find it nowhere; he must either deny it or create it’”
The character is quoting Nietzsche, who said that for the Ancient Greeks and Romans, “all things, whether good or bad, are deified”.
Daphne du Maurier herself viewed Greek mythology as heavily influencial. In her essay “Romantic Love”, she says:
“These stories, savage, brutal, utterly amoral, are the foundation of our literary culture. They spread from Greece to Rome and so throughout Europe … the birth of a heavenly son to a virgin has a curious similarity to the Greek myth preceding it.”
The good Christ then, could be shown to have his antecedent in an amoral mythology. Or perhaps everything comes back to predestination. The ending is deliberately ambiguous, leaving us with questions. Daphne du Maurier never wants to leave her readers entirely sure of the answer.
As Jung said:
“Perhaps – who knows? – these eternal images are what men mean by fate.”
August 17, 2023
Over educated tour guide Armino Fabbio has the easy life in his job travelling all over Italy with mostly foreign tourists, until he gets involved of the murder of a peasant woman in Rome, that runs out to be someone from his own past. He return to his home town Ruffano which feels haunted by his brother Aldo who was killed in the Second World War. 55o years previously 'The Falcon' a Duke oversaw a brutal regime in Ruffano, which as tension rise in the present day, people have forgotten the town's dark past.
Maurier plays with past and present to tell an intriguing tale of a town on the brink linked to Armino and his brother's past. Critically acclaimed by some, but overlooked by many, this is a very well written observed look at a fictional 1960s Italy where generations collide. 6 out of 12, Three Star read.
2023 read
Maurier plays with past and present to tell an intriguing tale of a town on the brink linked to Armino and his brother's past. Critically acclaimed by some, but overlooked by many, this is a very well written observed look at a fictional 1960s Italy where generations collide. 6 out of 12, Three Star read.
2023 read
April 19, 2017
4.5 stars
"I have had moments in my life, as has everyone, when something in memory clicks, when we are aware of a sensation of what the French call ‘déjà vu.’ Somewhere, some time, and God alone knew when, I had seen that bowed posture, the ample drapery spread, the arms folded, the head buried under the weight of shawls. But not in Rome. My vision lay elsewhere. The memory was childhood’s, blotted out by the years between."
Armino Fabbio, while in Rome carrying out the mundane duties as courier for Sunshine Tours, has a sudden jolt, a flashback of his past that will propel him to his hometown of Ruffano, Italy, in order to unravel a mystery that will haunt him if he does not act. Armino has not set foot in Ruffano since the end of WWII, when he fled with his mother and a Commandant of the German army, leaving behind the memory of a father and a brother who had both perished during the war. What he finds on his return are a deluge of sensations and nostalgic remembrances that were shaped by the impressionable mind and malleable consciousness of youth.
The city of Ruffano is steeped in history with one legend looming large – that of the fifteenth century first Duke of Ruffano, Duke Claudio, otherwise known as the Falcon. His story is mirrored in a painting which hangs in the ducal palace, titled The Temptation of Christ. Duke Claudio’s likeness is depicted in both the faces of Christ and Satan, reflecting the dual nature of good and evil. Armino reads through a historical text about the lives of the Dukes of Ruffano and gleans further testimony as to the character of the infamous Duke Claudio: "His brief life is shrouded in mystery, for contemporary authorities do not enable us to pronounce with certainty on the enormous vices wherewith tradition and innuendo have blackened his memory. A youth of outstanding promise, he became intoxicated by good fortune, and casting off his early discipline he surrounded himself by a small band of dissolute disciples, and dismayed the good citizens of Ruffano by licentious outrages and revolting cruelties."
With the annual Festival in Ruffano fast approaching, an ambitious scheme to seemingly reenact the history of the city is masterminded by the much admired Director of the Arts Council. The various factions of students within the university in Ruffano are already at odds with one another; and it appears that the festival will somehow increase the tension and bring everything to a grand climax – one which Armino fears to be very dangerous and directed within an atmosphere of fanaticism. His understanding of the history of the city as well as the impressions from his own childhood will greatly influence his own role in the impending drama. "The proud would be stripped, the haughty violated, the slanderer silenced, the viper die in his own venom. The scales of heavenly justice would thus be balanced."
Anyone that has read my reviews in recent months will probably have noticed that I have been reading several du Maurier works – and that I have been pouring forth praises and enthusiasm for each novel! I just can’t seem to help getting caught up in the brilliance of her storytelling – the psychological complexities, the intoxicating atmosphere of the surroundings, and the remarkable presence of her characters in my imagination. This book is lesser-known in comparison to such acclaimed works like Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel, but its impact is just as powerful and perhaps even more meaningful. The battle between good and evil, the effect of memory on the perception of current events, and the opposing natures, or perhaps even duality, of creation and destruction are all examined by du Maurier in this compelling feat of writing. I don’t rank this as one of my very favorite pieces by this author (they can’t all be number one, after all!), but it is a must-read for any fan and one that I recommend highly. For the most part, it’s a slower, reflective sort of book that will make you ponder many of the themes presented.
"I have had moments in my life, as has everyone, when something in memory clicks, when we are aware of a sensation of what the French call ‘déjà vu.’ Somewhere, some time, and God alone knew when, I had seen that bowed posture, the ample drapery spread, the arms folded, the head buried under the weight of shawls. But not in Rome. My vision lay elsewhere. The memory was childhood’s, blotted out by the years between."
Armino Fabbio, while in Rome carrying out the mundane duties as courier for Sunshine Tours, has a sudden jolt, a flashback of his past that will propel him to his hometown of Ruffano, Italy, in order to unravel a mystery that will haunt him if he does not act. Armino has not set foot in Ruffano since the end of WWII, when he fled with his mother and a Commandant of the German army, leaving behind the memory of a father and a brother who had both perished during the war. What he finds on his return are a deluge of sensations and nostalgic remembrances that were shaped by the impressionable mind and malleable consciousness of youth.
The city of Ruffano is steeped in history with one legend looming large – that of the fifteenth century first Duke of Ruffano, Duke Claudio, otherwise known as the Falcon. His story is mirrored in a painting which hangs in the ducal palace, titled The Temptation of Christ. Duke Claudio’s likeness is depicted in both the faces of Christ and Satan, reflecting the dual nature of good and evil. Armino reads through a historical text about the lives of the Dukes of Ruffano and gleans further testimony as to the character of the infamous Duke Claudio: "His brief life is shrouded in mystery, for contemporary authorities do not enable us to pronounce with certainty on the enormous vices wherewith tradition and innuendo have blackened his memory. A youth of outstanding promise, he became intoxicated by good fortune, and casting off his early discipline he surrounded himself by a small band of dissolute disciples, and dismayed the good citizens of Ruffano by licentious outrages and revolting cruelties."
With the annual Festival in Ruffano fast approaching, an ambitious scheme to seemingly reenact the history of the city is masterminded by the much admired Director of the Arts Council. The various factions of students within the university in Ruffano are already at odds with one another; and it appears that the festival will somehow increase the tension and bring everything to a grand climax – one which Armino fears to be very dangerous and directed within an atmosphere of fanaticism. His understanding of the history of the city as well as the impressions from his own childhood will greatly influence his own role in the impending drama. "The proud would be stripped, the haughty violated, the slanderer silenced, the viper die in his own venom. The scales of heavenly justice would thus be balanced."
Anyone that has read my reviews in recent months will probably have noticed that I have been reading several du Maurier works – and that I have been pouring forth praises and enthusiasm for each novel! I just can’t seem to help getting caught up in the brilliance of her storytelling – the psychological complexities, the intoxicating atmosphere of the surroundings, and the remarkable presence of her characters in my imagination. This book is lesser-known in comparison to such acclaimed works like Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel, but its impact is just as powerful and perhaps even more meaningful. The battle between good and evil, the effect of memory on the perception of current events, and the opposing natures, or perhaps even duality, of creation and destruction are all examined by du Maurier in this compelling feat of writing. I don’t rank this as one of my very favorite pieces by this author (they can’t all be number one, after all!), but it is a must-read for any fan and one that I recommend highly. For the most part, it’s a slower, reflective sort of book that will make you ponder many of the themes presented.
April 1, 2017
"It's never too early for Venice".......
Fabbio ( or "Beo," short for beato or "blessed" in Italian), is engaged in a "flight without purpose".
Fabbio, was the courier of Sunshine Tours...in Italy. His group was about to begin their second day of morning shopping -followed by lunch - refreshed from a night sleep
when it's discovered that there has been a murder off the via Sicilian..... within 100 yards of the Hotel Splendido where they were staying.
A woman was found stabbed on the church steps at 5 AM in the morning. Two English teachers from London on the bus tour, were upset because they feel they could've saved her, because they saw her sleeping there at 9 PM the night before.
The night before, just before everyone was retiring to their rooms for sleep, a Mr. Bloom slipped Fabbio a note saying "come to my room", with ten thousand lire.
Fabbio wasn't ever interested in going to a clients room --so he walked outside and slipped that note and ten thousand lire into the pocket of the old women on the church stairs.
His bus tour is suppose to be headed to Naples.... however he's begging his supervisor to get transferred. He tells him he's in trouble, doesn't tell him why or what... says he want to be transferred on a different tour- ( with a different set of clients as well). He wants to to be put on a northern route. Annie two were going towards the Adriatic.
His supervisor, Giovanni, tells him it's too early. Fabbio is still begging...."well, then, not necessarily a coach, a tour, a private client who might consider Ravenna, Venice"
Giovanni finally fixes this situation...Fabbio gets his transfer: "Two Tedeschi in a Volkswagen going north and they want an interpreter who speaks German, which Fabbio does".
Fabbio is running for his life. What he will soon discover is that what really matters--is not running from the past, but the future.
Sound GOOD??? ...... this is just the TIP of the iceburg. This story is just beginning!!!
-----------------BOOK DISCUSSION INVITE:
For anyone who would like to read this book with a group of members here on Good Reads we will be discussing it the entire month of April.
Sara will be happy -- ( cough cough) --- calling for Sara --- to come in here and post the link of where to find the discussion group.
The discussions are low - key - with great people. I bought this book on Amazon for $9.99 - Kindle download.
It's possible to read this book pretty easy in 1 or 2 days -- but even if you've only read the beginning- it's enough to join the group. Not everyone will have finished it by the start date, April 1.
QUOTES:
"I went on walking up the via dei Sogni, and so out into the via dell' 8 Settembre, in front of the University. It was like walking into another age. The young were everywhere, pouring out of lecture rooms, laughing, talking, getting onto vespas. The old building which had always been known as the House of Studies boasted New wings, windows glowing not only with fresh paint that with vitality".
"The via Della Mira surrounding the whole city of Ruffano stretched before me, curving gently, while immediately to my left where the steps leading up to the palace and to the city above".
"The room was illuminated by flares and torches, which throwing monstrous shadows upon the fluted ceiling and saffron walls, gave to the whole eerie, somber, flavor, medieval and at the same time, exciting."
"The piazza was crowded with morning shoppers, and with the inevitable group of worthless individuals who, idle not from choice but from the necessity, came to the city center to stand and stare. Students were everywhere, arguing, loquacious, most of them streaming out of the piazza up and northern hill to the piazza del Duca Carlo.
Rumor, floating from one hill to the other, and then converging from all corners to the
piazza Della Vita, emerged in the small space like smoke from a steaming cauldron."
"There was a Communists plot to blow up the University… There was a Fascist plot to take over the municipality... Guests at the dinner-party at the Hotel Panorama had been poisoned... The private residences of the Head of Departments had been burgled... A manic from Rome, having murdered one of Ruffano's inhabitants, poor Marta Zampini, in the capital, was now loose in Ruffano itself, and had made an attempt on the life of Professor Elia..."
Fabbio ( or "Beo," short for beato or "blessed" in Italian), is engaged in a "flight without purpose".
Fabbio, was the courier of Sunshine Tours...in Italy. His group was about to begin their second day of morning shopping -followed by lunch - refreshed from a night sleep
when it's discovered that there has been a murder off the via Sicilian..... within 100 yards of the Hotel Splendido where they were staying.
A woman was found stabbed on the church steps at 5 AM in the morning. Two English teachers from London on the bus tour, were upset because they feel they could've saved her, because they saw her sleeping there at 9 PM the night before.
The night before, just before everyone was retiring to their rooms for sleep, a Mr. Bloom slipped Fabbio a note saying "come to my room", with ten thousand lire.
Fabbio wasn't ever interested in going to a clients room --so he walked outside and slipped that note and ten thousand lire into the pocket of the old women on the church stairs.
His bus tour is suppose to be headed to Naples.... however he's begging his supervisor to get transferred. He tells him he's in trouble, doesn't tell him why or what... says he want to be transferred on a different tour- ( with a different set of clients as well). He wants to to be put on a northern route. Annie two were going towards the Adriatic.
His supervisor, Giovanni, tells him it's too early. Fabbio is still begging...."well, then, not necessarily a coach, a tour, a private client who might consider Ravenna, Venice"
Giovanni finally fixes this situation...Fabbio gets his transfer: "Two Tedeschi in a Volkswagen going north and they want an interpreter who speaks German, which Fabbio does".
Fabbio is running for his life. What he will soon discover is that what really matters--is not running from the past, but the future.
Sound GOOD??? ...... this is just the TIP of the iceburg. This story is just beginning!!!
-----------------BOOK DISCUSSION INVITE:
For anyone who would like to read this book with a group of members here on Good Reads we will be discussing it the entire month of April.
Sara will be happy -- ( cough cough) --- calling for Sara --- to come in here and post the link of where to find the discussion group.
The discussions are low - key - with great people. I bought this book on Amazon for $9.99 - Kindle download.
It's possible to read this book pretty easy in 1 or 2 days -- but even if you've only read the beginning- it's enough to join the group. Not everyone will have finished it by the start date, April 1.
QUOTES:
"I went on walking up the via dei Sogni, and so out into the via dell' 8 Settembre, in front of the University. It was like walking into another age. The young were everywhere, pouring out of lecture rooms, laughing, talking, getting onto vespas. The old building which had always been known as the House of Studies boasted New wings, windows glowing not only with fresh paint that with vitality".
"The via Della Mira surrounding the whole city of Ruffano stretched before me, curving gently, while immediately to my left where the steps leading up to the palace and to the city above".
"The room was illuminated by flares and torches, which throwing monstrous shadows upon the fluted ceiling and saffron walls, gave to the whole eerie, somber, flavor, medieval and at the same time, exciting."
"The piazza was crowded with morning shoppers, and with the inevitable group of worthless individuals who, idle not from choice but from the necessity, came to the city center to stand and stare. Students were everywhere, arguing, loquacious, most of them streaming out of the piazza up and northern hill to the piazza del Duca Carlo.
Rumor, floating from one hill to the other, and then converging from all corners to the
piazza Della Vita, emerged in the small space like smoke from a steaming cauldron."
"There was a Communists plot to blow up the University… There was a Fascist plot to take over the municipality... Guests at the dinner-party at the Hotel Panorama had been poisoned... The private residences of the Head of Departments had been burgled... A manic from Rome, having murdered one of Ruffano's inhabitants, poor Marta Zampini, in the capital, was now loose in Ruffano itself, and had made an attempt on the life of Professor Elia..."
April 21, 2017
Du Maurier is good, even at her least suspenseful. And the plot here was not one that held any surprise for me. But her town descriptions and the campus were spot on.
It's certainly not my favorite, and I had read it before. About 1/3rd of the way through I remembered most of it. Some writing becomes extremely "mindset" dated on a reread after decades. This one didn't. But then again, those 1960's were certainly not my 1960's- so it was fairly difficult to mindset this time frame and nuance of it for me, in the first place.
It's certainly not my favorite, and I had read it before. About 1/3rd of the way through I remembered most of it. Some writing becomes extremely "mindset" dated on a reread after decades. This one didn't. But then again, those 1960's were certainly not my 1960's- so it was fairly difficult to mindset this time frame and nuance of it for me, in the first place.
April 30, 2018
3.5 stars.
‘The proud shall be stripped … the haughty violated … the slanderer silenced, the serpent die in its own venom …’
This book was fascinating- not so much for the story telling but for the themes. Of loss, of insanity, of obsession, of our own histories and how they influence our present. The book was gothic and sinister,the characters difficult to empathise with. I feel this story is bigger and deeper than my understanding and that the themes are important. There is that sense of claustrophobia and repression and the duality of good versus evil, sexuality versus sexual repression, of living in another’s shadow. The narrator reminds me of the narrator in Rebecca, some one slightly unformed or lacking in confidence and identity. An intriguing read for fans of Du Maurier.
‘The proud shall be stripped … the haughty violated … the slanderer silenced, the serpent die in its own venom …’
This book was fascinating- not so much for the story telling but for the themes. Of loss, of insanity, of obsession, of our own histories and how they influence our present. The book was gothic and sinister,the characters difficult to empathise with. I feel this story is bigger and deeper than my understanding and that the themes are important. There is that sense of claustrophobia and repression and the duality of good versus evil, sexuality versus sexual repression, of living in another’s shadow. The narrator reminds me of the narrator in Rebecca, some one slightly unformed or lacking in confidence and identity. An intriguing read for fans of Du Maurier.
September 19, 2024
The best I can say about this novel is that at least DDM never wrote the same story twice!
For most of the book I just wasn't that engaged. I may have missed some important info though as I kept falling asleep while trying to read it. Full review to come.
& I'm back - I don't know if I have that much more to say. This novel was oddly bloodless & I didn't care about any of the characters - & neither did I detest any so much that I wanted to see them get their come uppence! DDM, like many an older author in the sixties, (think Agatha Christie) struggled to bring young people from this rebellious generation to life.
I enjoyed the ending though (which ties in nicely with the title) and that pushed the book rating up to 3★.
For most of the book I just wasn't that engaged. I may have missed some important info though as I kept falling asleep while trying to read it. Full review to come.
& I'm back - I don't know if I have that much more to say. This novel was oddly bloodless & I didn't care about any of the characters - & neither did I detest any so much that I wanted to see them get their come uppence! DDM, like many an older author in the sixties, (think Agatha Christie) struggled to bring young people from this rebellious generation to life.
I enjoyed the ending though (which ties in nicely with the title) and that pushed the book rating up to 3★.
https://wordpress.com/view/carolshess...
April 4, 2017
I adore the writing of Daphne du Maurier. She blends suspense, moving description and psychological intrigue in a way that few other writers have mastered. The Flight of the Falcon is not one of her more acclaimed works, it is largely overlooked, but I have always thought it one of the best. There is a deeper meaning hidden within its pages, that would appear to me to be about temptation, self-illusion, the struggle of good and evil within a man, and the importance of being willing to dare and to try and to perish in the effort.
Armino Fabbio is a nondescript tour guide, making his way through the familiar territory of Rome, when he is plunged into his past by a chance encounter with a woman, a drunken destitute woman, who reminds him of his childhood nurse, Marta. Because of this encounter, he returns to his roots, a town named Ruffano, where his father was the curator of a museum before his death during WWII. In Ruffano, he discovers that the past that he believed to be dead and gone is alive and all-consuming.
Woven throughout this story are religious images, but not a moral treatise. Christ and Satan seem at war here, but which is which is sometimes difficult to determine. At one point a fellow character quotes him Nietzsche, “He who no longer finds what is great in God will find it nowhere; he must either deny it or create it.” Much of this book is about that need to believe or create. Nothing about Armino’s past seems cut in stone, everything malleable, and as the pieces unfold he must determine how these truths alter his present and future. What is clear is that he will never be able to be an anonymous, uninvolved, unattached tour guide again.
I hope to re-read many of du Maurier’s novels this year. It has been long enough on each of them that they come to me fresh and alive, and sometimes even surprising. She writes the way Hitchcock directs, with pace and development that build to a crescendo. I love that feeling of being swept along by the wind and then plopped back to earth again. I’m pleased she took me along on the Falcon’s flight.
Armino Fabbio is a nondescript tour guide, making his way through the familiar territory of Rome, when he is plunged into his past by a chance encounter with a woman, a drunken destitute woman, who reminds him of his childhood nurse, Marta. Because of this encounter, he returns to his roots, a town named Ruffano, where his father was the curator of a museum before his death during WWII. In Ruffano, he discovers that the past that he believed to be dead and gone is alive and all-consuming.
Woven throughout this story are religious images, but not a moral treatise. Christ and Satan seem at war here, but which is which is sometimes difficult to determine. At one point a fellow character quotes him Nietzsche, “He who no longer finds what is great in God will find it nowhere; he must either deny it or create it.” Much of this book is about that need to believe or create. Nothing about Armino’s past seems cut in stone, everything malleable, and as the pieces unfold he must determine how these truths alter his present and future. What is clear is that he will never be able to be an anonymous, uninvolved, unattached tour guide again.
I hope to re-read many of du Maurier’s novels this year. It has been long enough on each of them that they come to me fresh and alive, and sometimes even surprising. She writes the way Hitchcock directs, with pace and development that build to a crescendo. I love that feeling of being swept along by the wind and then plopped back to earth again. I’m pleased she took me along on the Falcon’s flight.
January 3, 2022
I did not like this novel, and I only finished it so I could tell other GR folks that I did not like it. I will give it 1.5 stars...so rounded up is 2.
Daphne du Maurier has much better books in her oeuvre than this in my humble opinion including Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel, The Scapegoat, and Jamaica Inn. And I liked this collection of shorts -- The Doll: The Lost Short Stories. I did not like two other novels of hers – Frenchman’s Creek and The House on the Strand -- so I can run hot and old and lukewarm on Dame Daphne. 🙂 🙁 😐
The time period for this novel is the 1950s and the setting is Italy. It takes a good long while to understand the set-up for the thesis of the novel and by that time I had lost my patience. I have no idea what was the impetus for this novel...I found it to be boring throughout as well as an unsatisfying read.
So there!!! 😐
Reviews:
• She liked it although she called it a bit of a slow burn...https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2020/...
• https://eigermonchjungfrau.blog/2020/...
• https://shereadsnovels.com/2011/08/13...
Daphne du Maurier has much better books in her oeuvre than this in my humble opinion including Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel, The Scapegoat, and Jamaica Inn. And I liked this collection of shorts -- The Doll: The Lost Short Stories. I did not like two other novels of hers – Frenchman’s Creek and The House on the Strand -- so I can run hot and old and lukewarm on Dame Daphne. 🙂 🙁 😐
The time period for this novel is the 1950s and the setting is Italy. It takes a good long while to understand the set-up for the thesis of the novel and by that time I had lost my patience. I have no idea what was the impetus for this novel...I found it to be boring throughout as well as an unsatisfying read.
So there!!! 😐
Reviews:
• She liked it although she called it a bit of a slow burn...https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2020/...
• https://eigermonchjungfrau.blog/2020/...
• https://shereadsnovels.com/2011/08/13...
July 21, 2014
"No one could walk by night for fear of the of Falcon's sudden descent into the city when, aided by his followers, he would seize and ravage...."
Oooh, I just love Du Maurier, she always delivers the goods. Armino Fabbio is working for Sunshine tours and while in Rome with his beef and barbarians (Americans and Brits) he comes across a down and out woman at the steps of a church, a woman who reminds him of someone from his childhood. Taking pity he slips her some money, but she later ends up murdered and Armino blames himself - if it hadn't been for the money no one would have robbed and then murdered her - or so he reasons. Distraught over the woman's identity he takes a holiday from his job and heads north to the city where he was born and where he recalls the murdered woman - Ruffano. Once there he finds himself and everyone around him being manipulated by a master puppeteer, who like Lazarus has returned from the dead.
Outside of that I'm not going to tell much more as I'd ruin it for the rest of you - read it for yourself. Du Maurier slowly builds her story into one heck of a climax as Armino finds himself in the midst of rival student factions and campus politics, all of which culminates in the final plot to recreate the "flight" of The Falcon, the first Duke of Ruffano, for the city festival - but will this flight end as disastrously as the first one? Despite a bit of a slow start, the finish was a nail-biter and she keeps you guessing until the very end. 4/5 stars.
Oooh, I just love Du Maurier, she always delivers the goods. Armino Fabbio is working for Sunshine tours and while in Rome with his beef and barbarians (Americans and Brits) he comes across a down and out woman at the steps of a church, a woman who reminds him of someone from his childhood. Taking pity he slips her some money, but she later ends up murdered and Armino blames himself - if it hadn't been for the money no one would have robbed and then murdered her - or so he reasons. Distraught over the woman's identity he takes a holiday from his job and heads north to the city where he was born and where he recalls the murdered woman - Ruffano. Once there he finds himself and everyone around him being manipulated by a master puppeteer, who like Lazarus has returned from the dead.
Outside of that I'm not going to tell much more as I'd ruin it for the rest of you - read it for yourself. Du Maurier slowly builds her story into one heck of a climax as Armino finds himself in the midst of rival student factions and campus politics, all of which culminates in the final plot to recreate the "flight" of The Falcon, the first Duke of Ruffano, for the city festival - but will this flight end as disastrously as the first one? Despite a bit of a slow start, the finish was a nail-biter and she keeps you guessing until the very end. 4/5 stars.
May 18, 2022
Zborul Soimului este o carte plina de mister. Totul incepe cu moartea Martei, doica personajului principal, Arminio.
Recunoscand-o cersind pe treptele unei biserici din Roma, si apoi afland de moartea ei, acesta se decide sa se intoarca acasa ca sa fie sigur ca e Marta din copilarie.
Dar aici, surpriza cea mare e cand isi vede fratele, Aldo, crezut mort in razboi.
Recunoscand-o cersind pe treptele unei biserici din Roma, si apoi afland de moartea ei, acesta se decide sa se intoarca acasa ca sa fie sigur ca e Marta din copilarie.
Dar aici, surpriza cea mare e cand isi vede fratele, Aldo, crezut mort in razboi.
July 25, 2017
This is the first book of Daphne du Maurier I have read. Not a popular book for her, wasn't even mentioned in her obit?
Armino is a tour guide for Beef and Barbarians. An experience with a homeless lady reminds him of home and he ends up dreaming of his parents and the palace. He leaves his job and gets a job at the University. The problems of the day with student demonstrations, questioning the arts in the walled Italian city of business peaks during the festival of the city’s fifteenth century ruler, the evil Duke Claudio, known as The Falcon.
du Maurier does such a good job writing about the medieval streets, historic churches and palace they seem very beautiful and charming. I found it to be an enjoyable read and would like to read other books by her.
Armino is a tour guide for Beef and Barbarians. An experience with a homeless lady reminds him of home and he ends up dreaming of his parents and the palace. He leaves his job and gets a job at the University. The problems of the day with student demonstrations, questioning the arts in the walled Italian city of business peaks during the festival of the city’s fifteenth century ruler, the evil Duke Claudio, known as The Falcon.
du Maurier does such a good job writing about the medieval streets, historic churches and palace they seem very beautiful and charming. I found it to be an enjoyable read and would like to read other books by her.
April 8, 2017
I read this with a buddy group on GR and am so thankful I did. They added so many layers to it that I would have missed if I hadn't been reading it with them. Nobody but nobody writes atmosphere like Daphne DuMaurier and, in this one, I actually heard music being played in the background.
March 27, 2013
Armino Fabbio (ne Donati) was the youngest son of Aldo Donati and Francesca Rossi. His father was the superintendent of the ducal palace in Ruffano and he grew up with all the tales of the mad Duke Claudio, the "Falcon", who had run the city in the 16th century. Evidently the Duke had some form of God complex (he had a painting commissioned where he took the place of Christ) and he believed that it was up to him alone to mete out "justice" to the citzenry for any perceived slight, misdemeanour or crime. For example, a page boy once forgot to provide lights for his evening meal and he had his head set alight and left him to die in agony.
Armino apparently left Ruffano aged 11 just after the war, his father having died in a camp and believing his brother, also called Aldo, to have been shot down from his plane in the fighting. Following a degree in modern languages in Turin, he lands himself a job as a courier for a holiday company, Sunshine Tours. While escorting a party round Rome he sees a woman he recognizes from his childhood, Marta - the family nurse, begging in the streets. Pitying her and feeling guilty, he gives her a ten thousand lire note which had been given to him by a client who had been hoping for a little extra "room service". The next morning, however, she is found murdered and it at this point that the story really gets going. He finds himself returning to Ruffano after a twenty year absence intent on unraveling the mystery of her murder. He finds Ruffano a hotbed of intrigue and mystery itself - a secret university society and various "rags" being perpetrated, so it would seem, by rival factions of students against each other.
The pace of this novel is extraordinary once Armino is back in Ruffano. All the events of the novel take place within a week or so and they are many. Practically every chapter ends on a cliffhanger. I found all the characters believable and fully realised. Du Maurier's descriptive prose was as sublime as ever. A couple of the plot points I was able to guess in advance, but not sufficiently early to mar my enjoyment. Du Maurier created a brilliant atmosphere of intrigue and forboding.
I thought this was wonderful and highly recommend it.
Armino apparently left Ruffano aged 11 just after the war, his father having died in a camp and believing his brother, also called Aldo, to have been shot down from his plane in the fighting. Following a degree in modern languages in Turin, he lands himself a job as a courier for a holiday company, Sunshine Tours. While escorting a party round Rome he sees a woman he recognizes from his childhood, Marta - the family nurse, begging in the streets. Pitying her and feeling guilty, he gives her a ten thousand lire note which had been given to him by a client who had been hoping for a little extra "room service". The next morning, however, she is found murdered and it at this point that the story really gets going. He finds himself returning to Ruffano after a twenty year absence intent on unraveling the mystery of her murder. He finds Ruffano a hotbed of intrigue and mystery itself - a secret university society and various "rags" being perpetrated, so it would seem, by rival factions of students against each other.
The pace of this novel is extraordinary once Armino is back in Ruffano. All the events of the novel take place within a week or so and they are many. Practically every chapter ends on a cliffhanger. I found all the characters believable and fully realised. Du Maurier's descriptive prose was as sublime as ever. A couple of the plot points I was able to guess in advance, but not sufficiently early to mar my enjoyment. Du Maurier created a brilliant atmosphere of intrigue and forboding.
I thought this was wonderful and highly recommend it.
June 27, 2019
There is no writer like Daphne du Maurier; another winning story for me.
January 28, 2025
The descriptive writing was wonderful: places, people and action. The emotional side was full of vivacious life, sometimes too full. The atmosphere of 1960s Italy overflowed. The plot, well, there it stuttered in the second half. The beginning could have been Graham Greene, the backstreets of Rome and an innocent placing himself in jeopardy, moving to a John Buchan cross-country chase, and on to a Violet Needham Italianate romantic adventure with a modern twist.
To begin with I felt sorry for Armino. Before the War he had been the darling little Beo, short for Beato, adored by his mother and those around him for his angelic face and mercilessly teased by his older brother Aldo. The years that followed changed everything. His father died, Aldo was believed to have been killed when his aircraft was shot down, and his mother went through a series of affairs to survive what was left of the War; first with a German officer, then an American and finally an Italian from Turin. Armino was pulled with her wherever she went. After his mother's death he was left with a university degree in modern languages and a job as a tour guide for foreign tourists.
It had been a tough life that was made tougher when he found that Aldo had survived too. He had fought through the War, taken advantage of his education and ended up as a professor at the University of Ruffano. It seemed he had gained everything compared to Armino. Then the truth is leaked out drip by drip and I slowly felt more or more sorry for Aldo.
The story is partly a family saga, partly a murder mystery, partly a historical fantasy, and partly a delving into a mind on the verge of tearing itself apart. It may sound hopelessly complicated yet it isn't in du Maurier's hands. And then comes the ending and all that beautiful storytelling drifts away as fancifulness takes over with a chariot and a pair of artificial wings. It makes one wonder if one hasn't been reading an elaborate fairytale all along.
To begin with I felt sorry for Armino. Before the War he had been the darling little Beo, short for Beato, adored by his mother and those around him for his angelic face and mercilessly teased by his older brother Aldo. The years that followed changed everything. His father died, Aldo was believed to have been killed when his aircraft was shot down, and his mother went through a series of affairs to survive what was left of the War; first with a German officer, then an American and finally an Italian from Turin. Armino was pulled with her wherever she went. After his mother's death he was left with a university degree in modern languages and a job as a tour guide for foreign tourists.
It had been a tough life that was made tougher when he found that Aldo had survived too. He had fought through the War, taken advantage of his education and ended up as a professor at the University of Ruffano. It seemed he had gained everything compared to Armino. Then the truth is leaked out drip by drip and I slowly felt more or more sorry for Aldo.
The story is partly a family saga, partly a murder mystery, partly a historical fantasy, and partly a delving into a mind on the verge of tearing itself apart. It may sound hopelessly complicated yet it isn't in du Maurier's hands. And then comes the ending and all that beautiful storytelling drifts away as fancifulness takes over with a chariot and a pair of artificial wings. It makes one wonder if one hasn't been reading an elaborate fairytale all along.
October 15, 2023
آنچنان که قبلا نوشته ام دافته دو موریه رمان هایش را همانند ارکسترایی بزرگ می سازد،ابتدا مقدمه ای گرم که خواننده با آن همانند روزی پاییزی که در گرمای مطبوع خورشید همراه ابر هایی سفید که آسمان در بر گرفته اند،نسیمی دل انگیز به او خوش آمد می گوید،سپس در سرتاسر کتاب مقدمات دلهره آور از هر سو شروع به سربرآوردن می کنند همانند ابر هایی خاکستری که کم کم جلوی تابش خورشید را می گیرند و سینه آسمان را می پوشانند و همزمان با شروع تاریکی بادی تند و سرد لرزشی بر تن خواننده می اندازد،همه اینا در یک جهت برای رسیدن به نقطه اوج ارکسترا..همانند مقدمات طوفانی هولناک و یورش بارانی سهمگین در آسمان..و سپس در نهایت اوج ارکسترا،آن طوفانی که از آن هراسناک شده و ناگزیر در سرتاسر کتاب پر التهاب منتظر آن بوده ایم فرا می رسد،و هر آنچه که ساخته شده و بدان عادت کرده ایم را نابود می کند و تغییر می دهد..در پایان تنها مخروبه ای طوفان زده برای خواننده باقی می ماند همانند صحن ارکسترایی طاعون زده و خاموش..
#دافنه_دوموریه
#کتاب
#ادبیات
#دافنه_دوموریه
#کتاب
#ادبیات
November 28, 2021
Some people have called this one a slow burn. I call it a steady pace. It is contemporary for 1965 when Italy was finally coming into some postwar prosperity. Yet history from as far back as the Renaissance pervades the tale.
Armino and Aldo are brothers who each believe the other to be dead. When they meet again in Ruffano all the conflicts and mysteries of their family ignite in the midst of a potential student uprising at the town's university.
Having read Elena Ferrante's quartet set in the same time period, I felt right at home as these tensions culminate in a startling conclusion. Du Maurier adds a spiritual dimension as well as a psychological thread and demonstrates her maturity as a novelist. Impressive.
Armino and Aldo are brothers who each believe the other to be dead. When they meet again in Ruffano all the conflicts and mysteries of their family ignite in the midst of a potential student uprising at the town's university.
Having read Elena Ferrante's quartet set in the same time period, I felt right at home as these tensions culminate in a startling conclusion. Du Maurier adds a spiritual dimension as well as a psychological thread and demonstrates her maturity as a novelist. Impressive.
August 3, 2021
Considerado pela critica como a obra prima de Daphne du Maurier, a escritora de "Rebecca" oferece-nos uma das personagens mais intrigantes da literatura. Aldo, um homem destroçado pela guerra, decidi punir os poderosos para "limpar" a sujidade do mundo. Os fins justificam os meios. E nem seu irmão é capaz de demove - lo dos seus perversos objectivos.
O que mais me fascinou nesta obra foram as intrigas entre a Faculdade de Humanidades e a do Departamento de Comércio e Economia, o histórico\moderno Falcão e a investigação de Armido para descobrir o mistério de Aldo.
Daphne du Maurier já me havia conquistado com a sua magnifica "Rebecca", este livro apenas veio cimentar o seu nome na prateleira dos grandes.
"Ele podia não ser o meu irmão, filho dos meus pais, mas desde do principio me possuía, corpo, coração e alma, e continuava a possuir-me. Era o meu Deus, e o meu Diabo também. Através de todos os anos em que acreditara morto, o meu mundo tinha esta vazio, sem significado. "
" Como Ícaro, ele voou demasiado perto do sol. Como Lúcifer, caiu. Nós, os cidadãos de Ruffano que cà ficamos, saudamos a coragem de um homem ousado."
O que mais me fascinou nesta obra foram as intrigas entre a Faculdade de Humanidades e a do Departamento de Comércio e Economia, o histórico\moderno Falcão e a investigação de Armido para descobrir o mistério de Aldo.
Daphne du Maurier já me havia conquistado com a sua magnifica "Rebecca", este livro apenas veio cimentar o seu nome na prateleira dos grandes.
"Ele podia não ser o meu irmão, filho dos meus pais, mas desde do principio me possuía, corpo, coração e alma, e continuava a possuir-me. Era o meu Deus, e o meu Diabo também. Através de todos os anos em que acreditara morto, o meu mundo tinha esta vazio, sem significado. "
" Como Ícaro, ele voou demasiado perto do sol. Como Lúcifer, caiu. Nós, os cidadãos de Ruffano que cà ficamos, saudamos a coragem de um homem ousado."
September 8, 2024
salute the courage of a man who dared
Did Daphne du Maurier write a bad novel? I don't believe it. Yes, I loved some more, and some a bit less, but for sure, there is an obviously brilliant pen in each one I read.
"The Flight of the Falcon" was:
--> a story of the love of two brothers
--> a story of resistance of the old world from the new one
The old are always frightened of the young, but you represent a threat to their whole way of life
--> a story of being oneself
“You know the one thing that nobody in our country can endure?” he asked lightly, holding his glass against the light. “Not only our country but throughout the world, and right through history? Loss of face. We create an image of ourselves, and someone destroys the image. We are made to look ridiculous. You talked just now about humiliation, which is the same thing. The man, or the nation, who loses face either never recovers and so disintegrates, or learns humility, which is a very different thing from humiliation"
--> a story of changes in Italy after the IIWW
I’m here to bring trouble and discord, to set one man against the other, to bring all the violence and hypocrisy and envy and lust out into the open, onto the surface, like the scum on Domenico’s pool. Only then, when it bubbles and seethes and stinks, can we clear it away.
--> a story of the need for love
--> a story of loneliness.
If you read the novel just as a mystery riddle, you will like it, but you will lose the most precious parts, metaphors, and thoughts. Read deeper, and you will find (perhaps a bit muddy) a source of wisdom and not answered questions. I love du Maurier.
once is no good
PS Perhaps not one of my favourites by the author, but still 4-4.5 stars (compared to others by her I have read) and 5 stars (compared to the genre).
October 20, 2014
Before I talk about Flight of the Falcon, I have an embarrassing confession. I know I read it once before, about fifteen years ago, because I recently found a list I'd made of book I was reading at the time, and this one was on it. Yet, I have absolutely no memory of it. Even reading it over didn't trigger the slightest flicker of recognition. If it wasn't for that list, I never would have suspected. Yikes! That is not a good recommendation for a suspense novel (or for my memory, but that's a whole other topic.)
If it weren't for this review, I suspect that fifteen years down the line, I might forget Flight of the Falcon all over again. It's not a bad book, but it's a bit slow-paced and predictable, and I find Du Maurier's writing style rather dull. The story is about a thirtyish Italian man, Armino, who returns to the city he left as a child after he stumbles across an old woman who reminds him of a family servant, and she is murdered the next day. While there, he discovers that the older brother he thought had died in WWII, Aldo, is still alive and perhaps plotting nefarious deeds to take place at a historical reenactment at the local university. Is his brother evil? Is he crazy? Who really killed the old lady? Will there be blood in the streets? After slogging through chapter after chapter to find these things out, the payoff is...zzzzz.
There is also a rather weird scene in which people at a cafe are discussing a rumor that a middle-aged spinster has been raped by a group of students, and for some reason, everyone is laughing about it. Du Maurier must have hung out with some odd ducks if that is how she imagined people react to such news. Other than that, not a bad book, but shall we say...forgettable?
If it weren't for this review, I suspect that fifteen years down the line, I might forget Flight of the Falcon all over again. It's not a bad book, but it's a bit slow-paced and predictable, and I find Du Maurier's writing style rather dull. The story is about a thirtyish Italian man, Armino, who returns to the city he left as a child after he stumbles across an old woman who reminds him of a family servant, and she is murdered the next day. While there, he discovers that the older brother he thought had died in WWII, Aldo, is still alive and perhaps plotting nefarious deeds to take place at a historical reenactment at the local university. Is his brother evil? Is he crazy? Who really killed the old lady? Will there be blood in the streets? After slogging through chapter after chapter to find these things out, the payoff is...zzzzz.
There is also a rather weird scene in which people at a cafe are discussing a rumor that a middle-aged spinster has been raped by a group of students, and for some reason, everyone is laughing about it. Du Maurier must have hung out with some odd ducks if that is how she imagined people react to such news. Other than that, not a bad book, but shall we say...forgettable?
July 13, 2016
The Flight of the Falcon was the penultimate book which I chose to read for my du Maurier December project. First published in 1965, the novel is set in the fictional city of Ruffano in Italy, which was inspired by a real city, but contains a plot and characters of du Maurier’s own creation.
The Flight of the Falcon begins in the twentieth century, in an Italian city with an incredibly violent history. The face of Ruffano is being modernised, around the focal point of its university. In present-day Ruffano, ‘Austerity was banished. The young, with all their fine contempt for dusty ways, had taken over’. The town has rather a sinister edge to it; there are those who follow students around at night, and a secretive society within the wider university organisation. A student named Caterina tells our narrator the following: ‘But I’m sure of one thing. I would never walk about Ruffano by night without at least half-a-dozen others. It’s all right round here, and in the piazza della Vita. Not up the hill, not by the palace’. Parallels are drawn ‘through murder, humiliation and outrage’ from the very beginning between the present day and the story of Duke Claudio, the Falcon, who lived five hundred years before.
The narrator of the piece, Armino Fabbio – known as Beo – currently works for Sunshine Tours, and describes himself as a courier; a ‘guide, manager, mediator and shepherd of souls… A courier can make or break a tour. Like the conductor of a choir he must, by force of personality, induce his team to sing in harmony; subdue the raucous, encourage the timid, conspire with the young, flatter the old’. The novel’s first main plot point comes when the body of a woman is discovered with a stab wound. Those on the tour with Beo had seen her the previous evening, passed out drunk on a bench. It turns out that she and Beo share a past connection, and Beo then has to deal with the fragmented memories of his childhood which become interspersed with his present: ‘I stood watching my grip, a wanderer between two worlds. The one the via dei Sogni of my past, with all its memories, but no longer mine; and this other, active, noisy, equally indifferent. The dead should not return. Lazarus was right to feel foreboding. Caught, as he must have been, betwixt past and present, he evaded both in horror, seeking the anonymity of the tomb – but in vain’.
The most interesting element of the plot comes when Beo, who returns to Ruffano and is employed as a temporary librarian, stumbles across a book which details the past of the city’s infamous Falcon, Claudio Malebranche: ‘A youth of outstanding promise, he became intoxicated by good fortune, and casting off his early discipline he surrounded himself by a small band of dissolute disciples, and dismayed the good citizens of Ruffano by licentious outrages and revolting cruelties. No one could walk by night for fear of the Falcon’s sudden descent into the city, when, aided by his followers, he would seize and ravage…’. The present and past stories converge through the guise of the town’s annual festival, entitled ‘The Flight of the Falcon’.
The elements of crime novel within The Flight of the Falcon tend to become glossed over after a while, and are not quite built up enough to keep the reader guessing. Beo’s first person male narrative voice is believable, but it does not feel as compelling or as well built as those in books such as My Cousin Rachel and The House on the Strand. I could have quite happily put The Flight of the Falcon down at any point and not picked it up again; I did not feel as though I particularly had – or even wanted – to know what was going to happen within its pages. I did not feel an ounce of compassion on behalf of the narrator, even when he was descriving some of the sadder things which had happened to him, and there was a relatively detached air to the whole.
At first, The Flight of the Falcon is a relatively easy novel to get into, but the pace is rather slow and it does tend to become bogged down in details from time to time. The dialogue is sodden with mundane and superfluous details. It did not feel as though du Maurier was perhaps as comfortable with her setting as she is with those books which take place in the United Kingdom and in France. I had the feeling throughout that something pivotal was missing from the novel.
The Flight of the Falcon begins in the twentieth century, in an Italian city with an incredibly violent history. The face of Ruffano is being modernised, around the focal point of its university. In present-day Ruffano, ‘Austerity was banished. The young, with all their fine contempt for dusty ways, had taken over’. The town has rather a sinister edge to it; there are those who follow students around at night, and a secretive society within the wider university organisation. A student named Caterina tells our narrator the following: ‘But I’m sure of one thing. I would never walk about Ruffano by night without at least half-a-dozen others. It’s all right round here, and in the piazza della Vita. Not up the hill, not by the palace’. Parallels are drawn ‘through murder, humiliation and outrage’ from the very beginning between the present day and the story of Duke Claudio, the Falcon, who lived five hundred years before.
The narrator of the piece, Armino Fabbio – known as Beo – currently works for Sunshine Tours, and describes himself as a courier; a ‘guide, manager, mediator and shepherd of souls… A courier can make or break a tour. Like the conductor of a choir he must, by force of personality, induce his team to sing in harmony; subdue the raucous, encourage the timid, conspire with the young, flatter the old’. The novel’s first main plot point comes when the body of a woman is discovered with a stab wound. Those on the tour with Beo had seen her the previous evening, passed out drunk on a bench. It turns out that she and Beo share a past connection, and Beo then has to deal with the fragmented memories of his childhood which become interspersed with his present: ‘I stood watching my grip, a wanderer between two worlds. The one the via dei Sogni of my past, with all its memories, but no longer mine; and this other, active, noisy, equally indifferent. The dead should not return. Lazarus was right to feel foreboding. Caught, as he must have been, betwixt past and present, he evaded both in horror, seeking the anonymity of the tomb – but in vain’.
The most interesting element of the plot comes when Beo, who returns to Ruffano and is employed as a temporary librarian, stumbles across a book which details the past of the city’s infamous Falcon, Claudio Malebranche: ‘A youth of outstanding promise, he became intoxicated by good fortune, and casting off his early discipline he surrounded himself by a small band of dissolute disciples, and dismayed the good citizens of Ruffano by licentious outrages and revolting cruelties. No one could walk by night for fear of the Falcon’s sudden descent into the city, when, aided by his followers, he would seize and ravage…’. The present and past stories converge through the guise of the town’s annual festival, entitled ‘The Flight of the Falcon’.
The elements of crime novel within The Flight of the Falcon tend to become glossed over after a while, and are not quite built up enough to keep the reader guessing. Beo’s first person male narrative voice is believable, but it does not feel as compelling or as well built as those in books such as My Cousin Rachel and The House on the Strand. I could have quite happily put The Flight of the Falcon down at any point and not picked it up again; I did not feel as though I particularly had – or even wanted – to know what was going to happen within its pages. I did not feel an ounce of compassion on behalf of the narrator, even when he was descriving some of the sadder things which had happened to him, and there was a relatively detached air to the whole.
At first, The Flight of the Falcon is a relatively easy novel to get into, but the pace is rather slow and it does tend to become bogged down in details from time to time. The dialogue is sodden with mundane and superfluous details. It did not feel as though du Maurier was perhaps as comfortable with her setting as she is with those books which take place in the United Kingdom and in France. I had the feeling throughout that something pivotal was missing from the novel.
February 12, 2021
Hang a man...
Kind of like du Maurier's The Scapegoat in some of its themes.
Started to remind me a lot of the movie Wicker Man.
I read a volume that was abt 300 pages long, it went something like this:
The first 100 were good, excellent even, I liked what was happening and liked the characters. Du Maurier's writing is the best.
Second 100 pages I don't want to say it gets boring but I can't think of a better word. It's pretty slow and I'm kind of waiting for something to happen or for me to get a sign of what's to come but it seems I'm just reading on and on without any sign of things moving in any direction and I'm wondering why I'm still reading.
Last 100 pages: Things start to enfold and the whole Wicker Man thing comes to mind. IT bothers me:
Kind of like du Maurier's The Scapegoat in some of its themes.
Started to remind me a lot of the movie Wicker Man.
I read a volume that was abt 300 pages long, it went something like this:
The first 100 were good, excellent even, I liked what was happening and liked the characters. Du Maurier's writing is the best.
Second 100 pages I don't want to say it gets boring but I can't think of a better word. It's pretty slow and I'm kind of waiting for something to happen or for me to get a sign of what's to come but it seems I'm just reading on and on without any sign of things moving in any direction and I'm wondering why I'm still reading.
Last 100 pages: Things start to enfold and the whole Wicker Man thing comes to mind. IT bothers me:
April 19, 2022
I really enjoyed this book by Daphne du Maurier. I had no idea she was so prolific even later in the century. This book is told from an Italian man's perspective and takes place in Italy, in a fictional place called Ruffano which was so well-described I felt I had been there. The characters are intriguing, the setting is romantic and creepy (very Gothic), and the twists are unexpected. The character of Aldo Donati felt like a response to Nietzsche's ideas on the Superman, and I really enjoyed this character. Daphne du Maurier's work is still fresh and exciting today, and it's a real shame that she is one of those women writers who has been ignored or forgotten for the most part, when her work is not only plot-driven but also full of interesting characters and philosophical ideas, and also well-written.
I saw there was to be a miniseries - I'm glad that the book will be getting more attention as a result, but I'm not sure this will have as much of an impact as a show or a movie as it does in book form. I'll definitely watch it if I get the opportunity in order to see how it plays out on film.
I really enjoyed this and definitely recommend it.
I saw there was to be a miniseries - I'm glad that the book will be getting more attention as a result, but I'm not sure this will have as much of an impact as a show or a movie as it does in book form. I'll definitely watch it if I get the opportunity in order to see how it plays out on film.
I really enjoyed this and definitely recommend it.
June 20, 2012
I was a little so-so on this book. On the one hand, I found the actual plot pretty predicable, right down to the "flight" in the title and all the revelations leading up to it. On the other hand, I enjoyed how du Maurier depicted a 1960s college campus in Italy as a little fiefdom, with department heads serving as nobility, students as peasants, and the Rector as a benevolent but absent king. Very well done and interesting.
The portrayal of women left a lot to be desired (I can't believe that, even in 1960s Italy, people would laugh off the rape of a spinster!). Armino was a very passive main character; events just seemed to happen to him and he never really took any action. In fact, he was actually very like a stereotypical woman in books from this era!
Not nearly as gothic and atmospheric as Rebecca, or as heartbreaking as My Cousin Rachel, but a solid read.
The portrayal of women left a lot to be desired (I can't believe that, even in 1960s Italy, people would laugh off the rape of a spinster!). Armino was a very passive main character; events just seemed to happen to him and he never really took any action. In fact, he was actually very like a stereotypical woman in books from this era!
Not nearly as gothic and atmospheric as Rebecca, or as heartbreaking as My Cousin Rachel, but a solid read.
August 11, 2012
I think this was du Maurier's attempt to write something romantic - with Renaissance Italian themes - but also make it current by invoking the campus unrest of the 60s. (At the imaginary University of Ruffino, or was it Ruffano, or Refulgo, or Rafalca, I've already forgotten - two disparate student groups clash, the arts students and the "C & E" students - commerce and economics, sometimes violently.) At the heart of this terribly boring tale lie mysteries of birth, death, and murder, and an Icarus-like flight from a Duomo, or something.
November 29, 2020
I had such high hopes for this book, loving Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel as much as I did. But while this was a unique story, it left so much emotional potential on the table. This could have been a riveting and powerful story about brothers, but instead, it felt like the reader - and even the prime character of Fabbio - were observers rather than participants. Still, it had echoes of Du Maurier's lush storytelling, and one who is a fan should at least include it in their reading.
July 26, 2020
3.75. Not the usual genre for this author. Was fun to be in an Italian hill town in the 60’s, with people going a round on Vespas and drinking Cinzano. The medieval backstory and festival brought me back to Siena as well. Quite the ending!
August 16, 2021
4.5
Even though the plot and its twists were all predictable the journey to them was enjoyable nonetheless.
With some fascinating themes and wonderful descriptions of the small town I do recommend- even if onlyfor the depictions of the 'beef and barbarians'!!
Even though the plot and its twists were all predictable the journey to them was enjoyable nonetheless.
With some fascinating themes and wonderful descriptions of the small town I do recommend- even if onlyfor the depictions of the 'beef and barbarians'!!
September 9, 2025
Lontano anni luce da "Rebecca", questo romanzo della Du Maurier, ambientato in Italia, è un piacevole intrattenimento letterario
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