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.
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 one the via dei Sogni of my past, with all its memories, but no longer mine and this other, active, noisy, equally indifferent. 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. Those on the tour with Beo had seen her the previous evening, passed out drunk on a bench. The novel’s first main plot point comes when the body of a woman is discovered with a stab wound. 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 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. 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. It’s all right round here, and in the piazza della Vita. I would never walk about Ruffano by night without at least half-a-dozen others.
A student named Caterina tells our narrator the following: ‘But I’m sure of one thing. 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. The young, with all their fine contempt for dusty ways, had taken over’. In present-day Ruffano, ‘Austerity was banished. The face of Ruffano is being modernised, around the focal point of its university.
The Flight of the Falcon begins in the twentieth century, in an Italian city with an incredibly violent history. 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 was the penultimate book which I chose to read for my du Maurier December project.
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