Review: "The Wings of a Falcon" by Cynthia Voigt

The Wings of a Falcon by Cynthia Voigt
First published 1993
★★★★★

Oh man, this book. Major spoilers below.

I picked this book up in a secondhand bookstore in the late 90s. I'm still not entirely sure why—maybe my book tastes were less established, maybe it was just a phase, I don't know. Fantasy, or fantasy-esque books, never called to me terribly loudly...except The Wings of a Falcon did. I read it, and I read it again, and I scoured various bookstore shelves until I also found and read Jackaroo and On Fortune's Wheel and Elske, and then I came back to Wings and read it again. I cannot overstate how much I loved Wings of a Falcon—I am a voracious reader now, I was a voracious reader then, and there was a period of several years when I consistently identified this as my favourite book. It's been years since my last reread, but I've recently been going through some of my childhood books (partly so I have a record of them on Goodreads), and when this one came up, I couldn't resist.

(Major spoilers, I said. If the above paragraph has tempted you, at all, read no further.)

What fascinates me so much is that I don't think this book would be published in its current form today. (It was republished in 2015 or so, sure, but not published new.) There are so many reasons for this: there's limited romance, when today "YA" is often synonymous with "romance lite"; characters who could take up an entire book drop from the page when the main characters move on, never to be heard from again (in a contemporary book, Nikol would probably show up again and again as the Big Bad); intensely serious themes are treated as matter-of-fact (war, women having very little agency over their lives and their bodies, the risk of incest in certain situations). But most of all: Oriel is not entirely good.

I wish I could read this again for the first time, because I still remember the gut punch at the end of the book, when Oriel is killed and Griff takes over the story. Up until that point, Oriel has been positioned as the hero: Griff is his moral compass, yes, but Oriel has strength and charisma and his wits about him, and he is determined to use those gifts to rise as far as he is able. This holds true no matter what context they find themselves in: On the miserable island of their youth, Oriel dreams of becoming the Damall (effectively a slavemaster who trades in boys, and the only adult on the island); in the freedom of town, he positions himself to inherit a saltwell (and the wealth and prestige that comes with it); captured by Wolvers (perhaps akin to Vikings), he knows that he too could find success as a Wolver, if that is where life leads him. It's Griff who is Oriel's checks and balances, but it's also Griff standing behind Oriel and supporting his decisions at every turn.

Oriel is a leader from the beginning—and in a contemporary YA book, he'd be the hero throughout. But for all that Oriel is a leader, and seeks to be a good one, he is...not always a good person. He is not terribly troubled by the idea of throwing the weakest to the Wolvers, as it were. His relationships with women are complicated, not that he sees them as such—that is, he views his love as true and unerring, but his interest in women throughout the book is built on what he might be able to achieve through them. He falls into a relationship with one woman; he sets off to pursue (with the first woman's understanding) another woman who can offer him far more material wealth and power; he learns that the first woman is pregnant with his child, and he asks "What will you do?" because as far as he is concerned, that child is really no business of his. (If this book were set in the present day, Oriel would absolutely be a would-be politician instead of a would-be earl.)

Oriel's death is, as I said, a gut-punch near the end of the book. I remember, hazily, how wrong it felt at first to have Griff take over the narration. He wasn't supposed to be the hero, after all; Oriel was finally getting all that he'd worked for. And yet...the farther into Griff's short section we get, the clearer his strengths. He does not have Oriel's vision or charisma or drive—but he does have a gift for seeing people, for thinking ahead to consequences, for seeking to do the right thing even when it is not the easy thing. And yet...in a contemporary book, I think it is Griff who would die near the end, if anyone did (maybe Griff would just be seriously injured), and his death would be a final turning point for the hero that is Oriel. The book is far better for not being my imaginary contemporary version.

I wish I could read this again for the first time—but also, I don't know what I would make of it now, if it had not been such a formative part of my childhood reading. I hope I would still love it. I still have my original copy, and I hope I'll still love it in another decade or two.