The Flight of the Falcon in Never too Late to Read Classics

May 27, 2011 Sara rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: romance, mystery, favorites

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 t 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.

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Jun 19, 2009 Laura rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: gothic-romance, read-2010, bookmooch, virago-modern-classics

Lovely book by Dame Du Maurier with another plot style.

As a young guide for Sunshine Tours, Armino Fabbio leads a pleasant, if humdrum life -- until he becomes circumstantially involved in the murder of an old peasant woman in Rome. The woman, he gradually comes to realise, was his family's beloved servant many years ago, in his native town of Ruffano. ...more

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