Book Review: The Flight of the Falcon

Well, call this one Monday's book review. I was trying to pre-schedule it for later in the week. Anyway, since it's gone live while I'm online, why not some Petfinder links? Why not, for the first time at this web site, search for the Eastern States' best pictures of adoptable...not falcons, but birds?

People are unfairly afraid of actual falcons. Well, they can be rough; that's why it's traditional to wear leather gloves and jackets when you go out with them. Anyway Petfinder displays pictures of pet birds with relatively short, blunt claws and beaks, unlikely to injure humans, as falcons sometimes do.

Zipcode 10101: Doodles from Quakertown

At the time of posting this shelter had several adoptable ducks and chickens. They had only one hen left, though they had half a dozen roosters, and there was no photograph of the hen. Doodles is "guaranteed friendly" and described as a bantam. Bantam roosters tend to spend a lot of time strutting around trying to look bigger and tougher than they are. They seem to realize that they're about the smallest warm-blooded animals they ever meet, and feel defensive about it. Sometimes they'll try to impress their mates and young by defying a human, charging at your ankles and warning you to leave their family alone, when you're bringing them food or water. If nobody kicks them too hard or steps on them, they eat a lot of nuisance plants and insects, for their size. If they become too annoying, they make good soup. 

If you want to meet them, not eat them (the shelter will take them back if they're too annoying), visit the birds' web page at https://www.petfinder.com/bird/doodles-54223092/pa/quakertown/last-chance-ranch-animal-rescue-pa105/ .

Zipcode 20202: Ohio from Frederick 

Despite his color, a black duck is not the same sub-species as a Black Duck. Black Ducks are generally smaller than mallards. The large amount of bumpy red skin on his face identifies Ohio as a Muscovy Duck, a domestic breed who tend to grow bigger than mallards, though the web site says he's still a small individual duck. They have a whole flock of Muscovy Ducks named after U.S. States. Muscovy Ducks are more likely to stay on the same pond rather than migrate away and get hunted down. They're also the breed with the infamous "attitude." Though they're not especially dangerous to humans I have seen them peck at ankles, or barge up to picnickers demanding food (a fed duck is a dead duck). They eliminate many nuisance plants and animals from wetlands, and many people think their attitude is cute. The one pleasant thing about being involved in an estate case in Maryland was riding the county bus to the courthouse and having time to eat lunch beside the pond with the Muscovy Ducks, who paddled around hoping I'd throw food at them, which I didn't.

To meet Ohio, visit https://www.petfinder.com/bird/ohio-55156537/md/prince-frederick/linda-l-kelley-animal-shelter-md487/ .

Zipcode 30303: Sunshine & Cheeky from Marietta 

Parakeets. The shelter says they're not really tame yet. Parakeets can be reared in cages and still, due to being relatively intelligent animals, take a good long time to decide whether any of the giant aliens who fill their food cups is a friend. To meet these wary birds, visit https://www.petfinder.com/bird/cheeky-and-sunshine-48418433/ga/marietta/papayago-rescue-house-inc-ga858/ .

Now the book...

Title: The Flight of the Falcon

Author: Daphne DuMaurier

Date: 1965

Publisher: Doubleday

ISBN: none

Length: 253 pages

Quote: “I lifted my head to the palace roof and saw brooding there, above the entrance door, the great bronze figure of the Falcon...his head snow-capped, his giant wings outspread.”

Though Armino, the narrator, has reached his full five feet five and earned his degree at the beginning of this novel, he does a lot of growing up in the course of the story. At the beginning he’s a “courier,”a tour guide, doing business as usual even when he sees an old drunk sleeping outside a church on a cold night. Only because he wants to reject a tip does he slip a little money into the passed-out woman’s hand. Within hours she’s been robbed and murdered. For the money? Fearing that the police may think he knows more about the murder than he does, Armino quits his job and goes back to his home town, where he gets a temporary job at the university.

There he finds that his much older brother, who he’d heard was killed in the war, escaped from the flaming wreckage of his plane and has become a charismatic, popular teacher. The university is a turbulent place, with rivalry extending to physical brawls between what a U.S. university would call its colleges. Is Armino’s brother Aldo a unifier, or a divider? There’s always been a touch of sadism underneath Aldo’s charm; is Aldo a sociopath? And what had Aldo to do with the death of the old drunk?

What women may hate most about this novel is that the turbulence includes a reported rape (of an older woman, as an insult to her husband, by students) that turns out not to have happened; the woman turns out to be a craven hysterical fool who deserved some sort of violent punishment, and has had one, in her own mind.

Then there’s Carla, the adventuress who befriends Armino. DuMaurier understood the fine line between the level of eroticism publishers wanted, in the 1960s, and the level that would embarrass her mostly female audience if their children picked up her books. Some sexual sin takes place, and everyone including Armino gets into compromising situations, but on-stage  sexuality is limited to Carla’s kissing Armino “like that” shortly before she confides her plans to seduce whichever older, richer man she can get and her infatuation with Aldo.

What some other readers may dislike about this novel is that, although it’s a “Romance” in the classical sense of exotic settings and unlikely plot, there’s no “romance” in the more common sense at all. It’s a straight character study of two bachelor brothers, neither of whom seems to be capable of love. From the fact that schizophrenic patients become asexual Freud  extrapolated a belief that, although celibate adults might be able to sublimate their sexuality into an all-consuming passion for their work, generally people who didn’t “fall in love” were at risk for schizophrenia. Neither Aldo nor Armino is schizophrenic (Aldo seems intended to be, instead, a classic narcissist) but both are flawed characters. In the process of worrying about Aldo’s flaws, Armino begins to recognize and overcome a few of his own.

Though DuMaurier has never been considered a great writer, she’s always been agreed to be a good one. Her novels were the kind of thing you got no credit for studying at school, but were expected to have read for fun. If you enjoy feeling that you’re smarter and braver than the fictional characters you read about, you’ll probably like Armino.