Falconer is a prison. Farragut is a drug addict professor jailed (zip to ten) for killing his brother. He has an affair with a man named Jody, who wears basketball sneakers and has a high IQ. Jody escapes Falconer in a helicopter, with the cardinal, dressed in an altar boy's drapes.
I kept thinking of the Yeats poem with the line, "the falcon cannot hear the falconer," and I assume I was meant to. Jody goes off into the sky. And also Farragut looks out windows and up into the sky often, and when he does the story leaves the prison as he remembers that outside world, where he was happy in nature and powerful in his body.
At the end of the book, Farragut escapes too, in a way I think I've seen in a movie, and once out he meets a poor man who gives him his coat and pays his bus fare. I am a sucker for stories where greatness of spirit is rewarded. The dead brother was guilty of being mean and petty. Farragut is addicted and adulterous and maybe a murderer, but he is good to his cellmates and honest in his love and clever about making radios. Oh, and witty. Maybe I am a sucker for stories where wit is rewarded.
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