Back in early 2019 I received a smart hardback copy of The Godfather by Mario Puzo in the post. I hadn’t bought it. Penguin Classics was issuing a new edition for the book’s 50th anniversary and had sent me (along with many other book bloggers, I’m sure) a free review copy. I put it on my shelf of unsolicited review copies figuring that in one of my periodic clearouts I’d probably get rid of it. But it stayed there, an intriguing option for the right occasion.

Three and a half years later, I have COVID and am isolating from Tim (which sucks) and the rest of the world (less bothered). The one positive is that by not spending my evenings with anyone else, I am flying through books. After finishing the two books I had already started, I asked Tim to select some books for me from my TBR shelves. He left me a stack of three very different books: If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha, A Map of Tulsa by Benjamin Lytal and The Godfather by Mario Puso. Well, if there was ever a time to read a 600-page saga…

I’ve seen the films (albeit a very long time ago) and had heard many times that they’re far superior to the source material. Even Francis Ford Coppola, in his introduction to this edition, calls it a “potboiler”, albeit one with Shakespearean-level plotting. And I am averse to the romanticisation of violence, murder and the other terrible behaviours in this story. But I figured I’d give it a go and if it was awful then I would finally add it to the charity pile.

I was quickly hooked. Puzo carefully metes out the necessary information – who characters are, their backgrounds and relationships – between thrillingly cryptic conversations and gripping action. The plot bounces along but not by sacrificing character development. These may not be people I would ever want to meet, but they’re not purely evil “baddies” either – they’re interesting, three-dimensional humans with complex motivations and justifications.

I mean, they’re also pretty much all misogynistic, racist, homophobic antisemites who use violence to get their own way. Even Don Vito Corleone, the Godfather himself, famous for his quiet “reasoning”, is only persuasive because hidden in every conversation is the threat of violence – albeit violence that will never come from his own hand.

Like the first film, the book opens with the wedding of Connie Corleone, the Don’s only daughter. Before we meet the Corleones, Puzo introduces three men who will be guests at the wedding – men who will play roles throughout the saga to come, men who are not part of the crime family themselves but who each have a favour to ask the Don – knowing that the Don will eventually call in those favours.

“Don Vito Corleone was a man to whom everybody came for help, and never were they disappointed. He made no empty promises, nor the craven excuse that his hands were tied by more powerful forces in the world than himself. It was not necessary that he be your friend, it was not even important that you had no means with which to repay him…Don Corleone would take that man’s troubles to his heart…It was understood, it was mere good manners, to proclaim you were in his debt.”

Puzo then uses the seating arrangements at the wedding to illustrate the status of family and guests. Youngest son Michael Corleone is sat apart from the rest with his non-Italian girlfriend Kay, explaining his family to her, hinting at but obscuring the real truth. Eldest son Sonny has pride of place at the head table but conspicuously disappears with the maid of honour thinking no-one has noticed. Middle son Fredo is at his father’s right hand but quickly glossed over as unimportant. He will not be inheriting this kingdom.

Because as Coppola recognised back in 1969 when he first read this, it is at heart a classical story of a king and his three sons, who each have only one of their great father’s attributes. Which attribute will prove most important, and therefore which son will be the next wearer of the crown? This question becomes urgent when an attempt is made on the Don’s life and someone else must take the reins, while also figuring out who betrayed who.

At first, I was rooting for the characters who manage to stay outside the Family business, hoping they would remain safe and alive that way. I couldn’t see any justification for gangsters shaking down small businesses for protection money, demanding a cut from illegal gambling dens, using violence and even murder to establish their so-called “legitimate” businesses such as importing olive oil.

Puzo does make a case for the mafia. In a world where the police, politicians and justice system are all corrupt, where the state ignores poverty and the abuse of the poor, then there is a place for an organization that will protect the most vulnerable. Time and again we see Don Corleone help out a local who has no power of their own, with apparently no gain to himself (though of course the combination of reputation laundering and favours he can call upon later is worth more every time than the money he spends). Then Puzo punctures that case by depicting the corruption of the mafia itself when it gets too big and powerful – both in Sicily and in New York.

“Dr Taza was perhaps the worst physician in Sicily. Dr Taza read everything but his medical literature, which he admitted he could not understand. He had passed his medical exams through the good offices of the most important Mafia chief in Sicily who had made a special trip to Palermo to confer with Taza’s professors about what grades they should give him. And this too showed how the Mafia in Sicily was cancerous to the society it inhabited.”

There are some weird interludes to the story. Puzo spends a little too long on Johnny Fontane – a famous singer and actor who grew up in the Family and is now going off the rails in LA after the breakdown of his second marriage. Fontane does play a key role a handful of times, but I didn’t need to read for the hundredth time about him going to dinner with his (Italian) first wife and musing on how he should never have left her.

Even weirder is the interlude about Lucy Mancini, who has a gynaecological problem that is described in lascivious detail. What’s extra strange is that Puzo uses this to make a serious – and very valid – point about gynaecological health not being taken seriously enough. He quite rightly attacks the prudishness about sex and sexual organs that causes women to suffer in silence, even die, of easily treatable illnesses. And he repeatedly stands up for abortion, giving his main doctor character the line “I do not believe a two-month foetus is a human being”. So why be so gleefully lurid in describing Lucy’s problem, or choose that particular problem?

Women do generally get a bad rap, being expected to put up and shut up. Violence against women is frowned on but rarely prevented. There’s an infantilisation of women and a tendency to equate youth and virginity to saintliness that I found queasy – though there are a couple of women who buck this trend, and arguably they are the ones who come out on top.

As with the films, the interlude I did enjoy is the one in Sicily. It’s a big change in tone, almost a dream sequence. Which makes its devastating ending even more shocking and nicely sets up the quicker pace of the rest of the novel.

So I didn’t love it but I didn’t hate it either. It shares with other mid-twentieth-century bestsellers like the Bond books a level of bigotry that makes me wince but that doesn’t prevent me from enjoying the overall experience. I might even read some of Puzo’s other works. But most of all I want to rewatch the films – at least the first two!

First published 1969 by G P Putnam.

Source: Penguin Classics promotion.