Having dominated both popular film culture and literature for the last 40 years, Mario Puzo's world renowned masterpiece The Godfather is the undisputed patriarch of an awe-inspiring legacy. It's translation onto screen was magnificent (part 3 excluded) but there can be no shortage of superlatives to describe the book in which this idea was first born.
1946. New York. Picture Don Corleone; a family man; a generous man; a reasonable man ... and ruthless Sicilian mobster, the hardened Lord of the Cosa Nostra.
But the old man's days are numbered and the future of his empire, built on the sweat and the blood and the grit borne over his long and tumultuous lifetime, rests in the hands of his children. Santino, the angsty, quixotic hot-head; Fredo, the fickle, weak-willed sapling; Tom, his adopted son of German-Irish descent, who despite his irrevocable love for the Don, has not yet proven his cunning or worth. There's Connie, too, frivolous and crude, a daughter who has just been grafted into a doomed marriage.
But, finally, there is Michael, the youngest Corleone who refuses to conform to family tradition. Controversy is an endemic part of him. He enlists to fight in in Second World War as a common "Yank" and then later gets engaged to an All-American Pastor's daughter.
But when his father takes a turn for the worse and old tensions between the five great mafia families of New York intensify, Michael begins to give in to intrinsic Sicilian pride and with betrayal, embitterment, bloodshed and a narcotics operation fraught with the eminence of capital punishment, he falls.
A good man's heart goes cold, pickled in the sour juices of revenge. Family values are taken to a new, frankly preposterous high. Unparalleled levels of gang violence and mindless murder are opened up in Puzo's almost musical and poignant narrative (the reader can practically taste the bitter citrus of Sicilian lemon on a dusty Italian evening).
This book is powerful and simply brilliant. The characters, so hardened and caustic at first glance, are in truth foolish or at least under the influence of greed and blood-thirsty ambition. But they are also sad, sad microcosms, none more so than the protagonist, Michael. What appears to be his heroism and desperation to escape forced Sicilian "norm" at the beginning of the novel change so subtly throughout the story that Michael's transition from good to bad is almost seamless.
And then, when the gunfire and butchery has ceased, you yourself are left questioning to what limits you would go for your family's protection.
But, of course, nothing is ever personal. Just business.
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