Robin Hood Rides Again

BOOKS

James Wolcott

Mario Puzo is a writer with big, grabby mitts. He isn’t swift, he isn’t subtle, and his previous novel, Fools Die, seemed to swim in fatty byproducts. But in the Corleone family of The Godfather he bred a troupe of monsters as shabbily immortal as Faulkner’s no-account Snopeses. In his new novel, The Sicilian (Linden Press/Simon & Schuster), he’s brought Michael Corleone and his rotting, damned soul back for an encore.

It’s a muted encore, and deliberately so. Puzo understands that Francis Coppola’s Godfather films have displaced his book as the true treasure vault of the Corleone mystique, and that Michael Corleone will forever be associated with A1 Pacino’s eaten-away features and brooding, murderous silences. So in The Sicilian Michael doesn’t cast a dominating shadow but, rather, frames the action, carrying with him a pinch of the Corleone myth, from which the main action blooms in blood-red petals. A new gallery of ogres are on display here, carved from coarse yellow stone, and each is regarded unsquintingly. In The Godfather, evil schemed behind curtains of shadow; in The Sicilian, evil announces itself in sunlight and rejoices in the defiant bounce of its own echo.

The novel opens in 1950, with Michael Corleone nearing the end of a two-year exile from America following a double rubout (“He had murdered a high police official of New York City while executing an enemy of the Corleone Empire”). Back home, his brother Sonny has been perforated with machine-gun fire in a shoot-out, and his father, Don Corleone, is in repair from his own wounds. But before Michael can return, he’s ordered by his father to smuggle out of Italy a Sicilian desperado named Salvatore Giuliano, whose untamed antics have made him nuisance numero uno among Sicily’s ruling elders.

Young, bronze, and dashing, Turi Giuliano robs from the rich and gives to the poor, pokes his gun barrel up the noses of church and state, treats women with courtly aplomb (he forbids his gang to rape), and remains even in his roaming violence a model son to his dear old mama. He’s a guitar-strumming charmer, the very ideal of the romantic bandit, and yet he’s not a creation of Puzo’s imagination. For there really was a Turi Giuliano, whose legend and exploits are briefly touched upon in Eric Hobsbawm’s classic study, Bandits (which features photographs of Giuliano alive and slain). By coupling Michael Corleone and Salvatore Giuliano in the same book, Puzo is introducing two different realms of myth, the way Nicholas Meyer did when he paired Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. Unlike Holmes and Freud, however, Corleone and Giuliano never quite touch swords. Between fiction and history, Puzo leaves a tantalizing space.

Robin Hood rides again in The Sicilian. And Robin Hood cannot die, argues Hobsbawm in Bandits, because he’s always being reinvented. “Poor men have need of him, for he represents justice, without which, as Saint Augustine observed, kingdoms are nothing but great robbery.” Sicily in this novel is a kingdom of robbery, a plundering conspiracy of the political, ecclesiastical, and criminal elite, who at first shrug off Giuliano’s mark-of-Zorro theatrics as a harmless diversion, a fizz of boyish high spirits. But once Giuliano tires of raids and skirmishes and tries to undo their stranglehold, taking the fatal step from outlaw to rebel, the empire strikes back—savagely. Like The Godfather, The Sicilian crosswires honor and treason, Catholicism and brute need, family duty and individual pride, and then shields its eyes as the overloaded circuits explode, maiming innocent bystanders. (Horses go down in Goyaesque flames.)

As prose The Sicilian is no great shakes, and there is a lot of bad Anna Magnani dialogue (“But worst of all, his heart became as hard as an olive pit,” says a grieving widow), but Puzo does a nimble job of juggling the great blocks of intrigue and self-interest that make up this brigand state. And in Don Croce, the bloated, spidery godfather who plots Giuliano’s demise, Puzo has created a chess-master double of Don Corleone, setting the stage for future jousts of cunning. The Sicilian (this season’s stocking stuffer, with a first printing of 400,000 copies) is too rudimentary to be literature, but it’s more than pulp—its themes are grand, and the storytelling has an authoritative thump to it. Is The Sicilian destined to be a movie? Ironically, Salvatore’s saga already has been filmed, by the Italian director Francesco Rosi in his 1961 docudrama Salvatore Giuliano. But that probably won’t stop Hollywood from having another go.