God Cousins

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE SICILIAN by Mario Puzo Simon & Schuster; 410 pages; $17.95

The Godfather was an irresistible tale of corruption and an equally tempting celebration of two sacred institutions, the family and free enterprise. The Sicilian, an offshoot of the 1969 bestseller, is also an offer of evil and romance that cannot be refused. Mario Puzo remains one of America's best popular storytellers, though his years of whittling movie scripts have resulted in chapters that seem spindly next to those in the full-bodied Godfather. In fact, the novel could be cut down and inserted in the earlier book. Offstage, at Mafia Central on Long Island, Don Corleone directs events that have profound effects in Sicily and teach Son Michael a cruel lesson in survival.

The time is 1950, and young Corleone is preparing to end the two-year exile imposed after he killed Sollozzo the Turk and the corrupt Police Captain McCluskey. Michael's final assignment is to arrange the escape of a Sicilian outlaw who has become an endangered folk hero. This proves difficult. The godfather-in-training is given the runaround and a chance to witness treacheries that seem to have originated in the Punic Wars.

Puzo works hard to make his story back-lot mythic. Spartacus led his slave army out of the Cammarata hills to fight the Romans. A skeleton dug out of the rocky soil is said to have belonged to one of Hannibal's elephants. The novel's hero, Turi Guiliano, is a Latin Robin Hood who can recite the Song of Roland and the basic guerrilla manual with matching ease. When he is not slipping into Montelepre for his mother's cooking and the attractions of a young widow, Turi muses under starry skies: "He no longer doubted that he had some magnificent destiny before him. He shared the magic of those medieval heroes who could not die until they came to the end of their long story, until they had achieved their great victories."

Guiliano dreams of smashing the power of the "Friends of the Friends." Sicilians, Puzo tells us, never say Mafia, a 10th century Arabic term meaning sanctuary. A thousand years later, the word is dark with irony. Founded to fight foreign oppressors, the organization has come to include the island's most terrible despots. Their fingers can be found in every business and social institution from Palermo to Catania, their hands behind countless murders. Puzo offers swatches of sad history and exotic sociology. Mussolini nearly wiped out the Mafia, but the U.S. Army ensured its comeback when it unlocked Fascist prisons. Kidnaping is a cottage industry, monks fake relics, and omert`a, the code of silence, is so pervasive that strangers often cannot get directions to their hotels. Casting a large shadow over all this is Puzo's Don Croce Malo, a model of the fatal charm and intricate cunning of a successful mafioso.

With the exception of Michael Corleone, Turi Guiliano is the shallowest major character in the novel. He reads good books, idealizes justice and respects religion. But if he has a thought subtler than how to trap his enemies, he keeps it to himself. By contrast, Aspanu Pisciotta, the hero's friend and chief lieutenant, has a vivid psychology that eventually sustains Horace's 2,000-year-old observation that "Sicilian tyrants never invented a greater torment than envy."

Unlike a spaghetti western, The Sicilian has no one-on-one shootout under a hot sun. Instead, Don Croce and Guiliano are locked in an elaborate melodrama of betrayals within betrayals. Puzo too demonstrates sly moves. His florid descriptions and graphic action scenes guarantee bug-eyed attention while he plants a sardonic fatalism in the heart of his book. One of the rarest commodities in his Sicily is truth ("A source of power, a lever of control, why should anyone give it away?"), while revenge is one of the highest virtues ("On this Catholic island, statues of a weeping Jesus in every home. Christian forgiveness was a contemptible refuge of the coward"). In the New World, far from the color and tradition, Don Corleone takes an even more brutish view: "Live your life not to be a hero but to remain alive. With time, heroes seem a little foolish."

This is cynical stuff from one of the most "respected" characters in popular fiction. But Puzo knows the mass-market game better than most: Give the angels the good looks, the devils the best lines, and keep the prose cinematic. This element is so strong that the book seems to be only the pupal stage of a story impatient to spread celluloid wings.

-- By R.Z. Sheppard