FLIGHT OF THE FALCON

Flight of the Falcon was published in 1965, coincidentally the year my own family moved to Italy, to the very city where the novel opens: Rome. The shadows of the Second World War, and the appalling poverty that made Italy so vulnerable to Fascism, were on the wane. Rome was incomparably lovely, a place where artists still came to learn from antiquity, where the privileged enjoyed the “dolce vita” celebrated by Fellini’s film of that name, and the less privileged were desperate for American dollars. Mass tourism was in its infancy then, and the kind of tours that du Maurier’s hero, Fabbio, takes around Italy were more innocent, less commonplace and less world-weary than one suspects they are now. Those were the days in which the waspish whine of a Vespa in the Eternal City carried young couples as beautiful as Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, not a pair of muggers out to rob the unwary walker. Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive.

Curiously, Flight of the Falcon is the only one of du Maurier’s novels to be set in Italy – though Don’t Look Now, her masterpiece short story, had Venice for its setting. Fabbio is a Germanicised Italian, shamed by his mother’s war-time affairs with German and American officers. He begins his story with a small bet and ends it with a desperate gamble for freedom. A tour guide, or courier, he is good at his job, which involves impressing his charges by sheer “force of personality” in acting as their shepherd, conductor and mediator. His elder brother, Aldo, is meanwhile plotting a much more sinister kind of leadership, revolving around the cult of personality all too familiar to survivors of the War. There are still elderly Italians alive today who complain that the country has never functioned so efficiently or so proudly as in the time of Il Duce, Mussolini. If du Maurier’s plot can seem too gothic, too improbable in its conflict between the good brother and the bad, it may not seem to extreme to those who remember how nations have been swayed to commit, and justify acts of atrocity under the influence of a single charismatic leader.

What I particularly admire about Flight of the Falcon is the way its drama seems to spring from a geography and architecture that exists in real life. Just as the second Mrs. De Winter’s tale is indelibly marked by Manderley, and Cornwall, so Ruffano is intrinsic to Flight of the Falcon. Du Maurier’s city is virtually indistinguishable from Urbino, the remarkable city east of Florence and south of Bologna, transformed and largely built by Federico de Montefeltro. Montefeltro was a supremely successful soldier who had his marriage celebrated in a famous double painting by Piero della Francesca, featuring the Duke and Duchess in profile on one side, and shining white horses, representing Fame and Virtue, charioteered by cupids across an idyllic Umbrian landscape on the other. Montefeltro became Florence’s favourite mercenary, and poured the wealth and plunder he obtained from war into expanding and beautifying his native city of Urbino. His Ducal Palace is a marvel of Renaissance architecture, largely paid for by decades of ruthlessness as a hired soldier. The Duke was a true Renaissance man, whose enthusiasm and genius as a condottiere, or hired general, was matched by an intelligence as subtle as it was fine. The greatest pupil of the greatest teacher of his age, Vittorino da Feltre, he personally conceived of his Palace’s architecture and design. You cannot walk through its rooms without being struck by the beauty of their proportions, their rare combination of taste and opulence, their theatrical sense of drama and restraint.

Certainly, du Maurier’s description of the Ducal Palace is one that many visitors to Urbino will recognise:
“ The silhouette might be that of some fantastic back-drop at a theatre…Fragile, ethereal at first view, the true impact came later. These walls were real, forbidding, with all the ingenuity of a fortress, concealing strength within. The twin turrets above their encircling balustrades pierced the darkness like sharpened blades. Beauty was paramount, menace lurked within.”

Above all there is the small room overlooking a drop of over a hundred feet to the foot below. What precisely was this room? Was it a tiny private chapel, as some think? It contains virtually nothing but Piero della Francesca’s haunting painting, The Flagellation of Christ, which John Mortimer observed in his novel, Summer’s Lease is, “ undoubtedly the best small painting in the world.” In Flight of the Falcon, the Palace’s great painting (by an unnamed artist) is of an imaginary Temptation of Christ, in which Christ is shown being tempted by his double, the Devil, to fly down to the rooftops of Ruffano. This parable will be re-enacted for real in the climax of the novel, when Aldo’s evil madness becomes irresistible. Temptation and guilt, rather than suffering and self-sacrifice, is what set du Maurier’s imagination alight. She was drawn to polar opposites, often of a domineering sexual nature but also of a familial kind, and her fiction is almost always concerned with the liberation of a secret or hidden self which emerges through conflict. It is easy to see how in Urbino such a combination – a controlled, profoundly beautiful meditation on suffering, and a balcony whose height invites thoughts of flying and falling – could have inspired her to write what is essentially a Gothic tale set in Umbria. The rivalrous bond between the two brothers is as old as myth, but here, too, Montefeltro’s history may have suggested her plot.

Born the illegitimate son of the Count of Urbino in 1422, Federigo Montefeltro inherited his father’s title at the age of 22 following the murder of his legitimate half-brother, Oddantonio. His people, as rugged and resilient as the landscape they inhabited, had their taxes kept low, which may account for Federigo’s confidence that he could walk about his city without bodyguards or fear of the kind of assassination attempts that haunted other leading Italian families. (Du Maurier’s duke has a very different attitude to his people, and is guarded accordingly.) Montefeltro’s iron discipline over his troops ensured a minimum of bloodshed and destruction during conquest. His rule was informed by a superb intelligence and scholarship: the library he created now belongs to the Vatican. Perhaps it was the creation of this library, once one of the best in Europe, that gave du Maurier the idea for Fabbio’s job as a temporary librarian’s assistant in the Ducal library.

The pattern of many du Maurier’s novels is to set up an opponent, often fiercely desired or admired, who turns out to be a Lucifer-figure. Du Maurier, whose intense feelings for her charismatic actor-manager father, Sir Gerald du Maurier, was herself overwhelmed by the memory of his commanding presence, and it is tempting to see her novels as a means of playing out an eternal fluctuation between love and hatred. Between these two magnetic poles, the world of her story spins into eventual disaster before coming to rest. If the usual sexual attraction between victim and predator is missing here, the fraternal bond more than makes up for it. Abel to his brother’s Cain, Fabbio (or “Beo”, short for “beato” or “blessed” in Italian) is, in fact, almost puerile in his lack of sexuality. He has, as we later learn, literally been usurped by his older brother. He is the opposite of the stereotypical Italian male, and the driver of his coach tour jokes that they should change places, so that Fabbio could drive while the driver makes love to the clients. His most passionate relationship is still his bond with the past, and his adored brother, Aldo. Their childhood games involved the younger brother dressing up in dirty linen and pretending to be Lazarus, raised from the dead by Aldo as Christ – or, tellingly, dressed as the Devil in the dark shirt of the Fascist Youth organisation to which he belonged. “He was my god, he was my devil too”, Fabbio realises. Where Aldo is two-faced and double-natured, Fabbio, like the nameless heroine of ‘Rebecca’, has grown up in his brother’s shadow and has barely enough personality to make an impression on those he meets. Doubles haunt du Maurier’s stories, but Fabbio is surely the most colourless until, fighting back, he finally acquires some style. He notices women if they possess a Madonna-like beauty, like Signora Butali, but otherwise they are to be feared and despised, like Carla Raspa. Sexually attractive women are rarely rewarded in du Maurier’s world, perhaps because of her troubled bisexuality, yet this portrait is a savage one.

Everyone in Flight of the Falcon is obsessed by someone else, mostly Aldo, and Aldo himself is obsessed with the Duke of Ruffano, known as “the Falcon”. He insists that, contrary to reason, the wicked Duke flew from the balustrade of his palace when tempted by Lucifer to show himself as the Son of God. Aldo himself became a pilot, believed to have been killed in a flying accident during the War. His return and re-birth as the city’s Director of the Arts Council makes him appear more than mortal, a Lazarus or Lucifer. Ostensibly a good citizen, Aldo has modelled his behaviour on the first Duke of Ruffano, a character whom we are told “cast off his early discipline…and dismayed the good citizens of Ruffano by licentious outrages and revolting cruelties.”

Fabbio’s emotional and spiritual entrapment by his brother, his desperate attempt to hold onto sanity and virtue, are also foreshadowed by the fictitious history of the ducal brothers. If Duke Claudio was mad and bad, his half-brother Carlo was known as “the Good”; it was he who rebuilt the city and made Ruffano famous. Du Maurier split the character of the real-life Montefeltro into two, which, given that he fascinates us by embodying violently contrasting natures, one regrets - but her fiction needed opposites to spark its dynamics. As it is, ‘Flight of the Falcon’ is du Maurier’s most political novel, one in which the consequences of breaking the accepted order of things is not solely a personal, emotional choice but has consequences for a small society. Though they fought in the Resistance against Fascism, Aldo’s followers want to rid Ruffano of “scum”. They accuse the old of hypocrisy, abuse of power and lack of passion. They fail to see that there are other virtues, without which a civilisation cannot continue to exist and develop. Du Maurier, who had written The Glassblowers, a novel set against the background of the French Revolution, was perhaps thinking of where such attitudes can lead. In order to punish those who fall short, Aldo’s followers carry out acts of cruelty and violence which cannot possibly be justified – or do they?

“Don’t imagine I’m here to bring peace to this city…” Aldo says. “I’m here to bring trouble and discord…to bring all the violence and hypocrisy and lust and envy into the open.” His words echo those of the deranged Duke, or Falcon: “The proud shall be stripped…the haughty violated…the slanderer silenced, the serpent die in its own venom.” Ironically, the person who seems to partake of these vices most of all is Aldo himself.

At the start of the novel, Fabbio knows he is engaged in a “flight without purpose”. It is only when he is forced to fly for his life that he discovers what really matters to him is not the past but the future, not the soaring glamour of insanity but the earth-bound humility of the sane. His initial mistrust of the present, “slick, proficient, uniform, the young the same the world over, mass-produced like eggs”, and his fascination with the past, “that sinister and unknown world of poison and rapine, of power and beauty, of luxury and filth”, has been felt by many visitors to Italy. Du Maurier, for all the high drama of her imagination, always surprises the reader by ultimately turning away from passion and elation. Aiming too high, in her fiction, is the prelude to catastrophe and downfall. It is the humble, almost anonymous characters, poised between the sweetness of hope and the bitterness of experience, who survive to tell their version of the story before us.

Ends 2060