Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres

It was with some surprise that I learned Louis de Bernières was a native of Britain, born in London and inheriting his family name from a French Huguenot ancestor. Between the name and the exotic locales of his books (only his most recent book features any scenes set in Britain), I had figured him to be at least a continental. As it turns out, de Bernières' international exposure simply started a bit later in life:

After four disastrous months in the British army, he left for a village in Colombia, where he worked as a teacher in the morning and a cowboy in the afternoon. He returned to England, where he was employed as a mechanic, a landscape gardener, and a groundsman at a mental hospital.

de Bernières is the author of seven books, of which the most famous is undoubtedly his 1994 novel, Corelli's Mandolin. Unfortunately, most people are more likely to be familiar with the 2001 film adaptation of the book starring Nicholas Cage and Penelope Cruz, which was a terrible movie that did absolutely no justice to the text that inspired it. Like was done to Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient (albeit in a far superior fashion in that case), the novel was largely reduced to a love story for cinematic purposes. As I said in my review of Ondaatje's novel, I normally will not read a book if I have already seen the movie, unless the movie was so good that I wanted to experience the story more fully.

That was, of course, not the case with Corelli's Mandolin. Instead, strangely enough, I was swayed by the overwhelmingly positive reviews the book has received on Amazon.com. These customer reviews are not always a good measure, particularly when dealing with a book that people were drawn to because it won a recent award or was assigned in a class. But for a fifteen year old literary novel to have nearly 400 reviews, and to achieve such a high overall rating, is rather noteworthy.

And it is a good thing I took note, because this is an extraordinary novel. And one of the things that makes it so extraordinary is the complex layer of narratives comprised of fluctuating perspectives and forms. All of which was done away with in the reductionist screenplay adaptation. The book opens with an almost folk-story vignette of rural life on the Greek island of Cephalonia, as the local doctor (a medical autodidact) examines an earache in a half-deaf neighbor:

Dr Iannis tilted the old man's head and peered into the ear. With his long matchstick he pressed aside the undergrowth of stiff grey hairs embellished with flakes of exfoliated scurf. There was something spherical within. He scraped its surface to remove the hard brown cankerous coating of wax, and beheld a pea. It was undoubtedly a pea; it was light green, its surface was slightly wrinkled, and there could not be any doubt in the matter. 'Have you ever stuck anything down your ear?' he demanded.

The evocative details featured in this distasteful episode are one of de Bernières' hallmarks, and he puts this skill to good use in passages of the book both more and less pleasant than the opening pages. In addition to Dr Iannis, the early chapters feature a monologue from Mussolini, the village strongman (Velisarios) hitting a local fisherman (Mandras) with a cannon he fired while holding in the air, and the first of several chapters written by "L'Omosessuale," Carlo Piero Guercio, a young Italian man who has joined the army for a most unusual reason:

I knew that in the Army there would be those that I could love, albeit never touch. I would find someone to love, and I would be ennobled by this love. I would not desert him in battle, he would make me an inspired hero. I would have someone to impress, someone whose admiration would give me that which I cannot give myself; esteem, and honour I would dare to die for him, and if I died I would know that I was dross which some inscrutable alchemy had transmuted into gold.

Of all the problems with the film, the greatest disservice it does to the book is the diminution of Carlo's character. It is his love stories, first with Francisco, and then with Corelli, that are perhaps the more moving romances of the book, if only because they are undiminished despite being utterly one-sided and unspoken. It is his military service alongside Francisco, in the ill-fated Italian invasion of Greece, that brings the most horrific battle scenes in the book. In the meantime, Dr. Iannis' daughter, Pelagia, has become engaged to Mandras, the young fisherman who was brought to her father's home for care after being wounded by Velisarios' cannon. He too goes off to war, and returns a greatly changed man, eventually becoming a member of a militant Greek Communist faction that is focused more on hoarding weapons to stage a civil insurrection after the war then resisting the fascists during it.

Corelli himself does not appear until more than one hundred pages into the book, when Cephalonia is occupied by Italian troops after their German allies came to their rescue, the Greeks having handily repulsed the Italian invaders. Housed with Dr. Iannis and his daughter, Corelli's budding romance with Pelagia is certainly a wonderful part of the book. But this is also a novel about the effects war has on reluctant combatants, like Mandras and Carlo, reluctant occupiers, like Corelli, and the reluctantly occupied, like the residents of Cephalonia. And the madness of political extremism whatever its form, from the bloodthirsty fascism of the Nazis to the ruthlessness of Mandras and his ELAS comrades. And the toll that time takes on one's hopes and dreams. And so much else.