The Godfather was published in 1969. I first read it in 1976, when I was 12. I didn’t read it again until last week, not least because, once the 1972 film became available to view on the telly (and once I was allowed to watch it, in the late Seventies) there was no need to revisit Mario Puzo’s wildly uneven saga, universally recognised as vastly inferior to Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece. Quite how vastly inferior it is was the question I wanted to answer by picking up the text again after almost 50 years.
Well, that was one reason for a second look. The other, naturally, was to check out the mucky bits, notably the infamous stand-up shag between Sonny Corleone and Lucy Mancini at Connie’s wedding. A girl in the year above had introduced me to this scene via her battered copy on a school trip to Paris. As was no doubt the case for many boys of my generation, a large part of my early sex education relied on this passage, along with the similarly graphic episodes in The Day of the Jackal, Jaws and The Fog. The girls relied more on Jackie Collins and Jilly Cooper.
I was shocked that I remembered the scene more or less word for word despite the mediocre prose. If Auberon Waugh had invented the Bad Sex in Fiction awards three decades sooner, Puzo would be on the roll of honour. But the duff writing isn’t the point. Some passages in, er, literature stay with you if you read them at an impressionable age. Given the dimensions of Sonny’s “enormous, blood-gorged pole of muscle”, I don’t think my early exposure to it did me any good. Also, I’ve always had this nagging feeling whenever I’ve been at a wedding that I ought to be having voracious casual sex in a spare bedroom. There’s a lot of sex elsewhere in the novel too — I’d forgotten how much.
I’d also forgotten the bizarre padding provided by two lengthy diversions (I hesitate to call them subplots, such is the absence of any connection to the continuing Corleone tale). One explores the progress of Johnny Fontane, the Sinatra-esque singer and actor whose career his godfather revives with the help of a severed horse’s head. The other informs us, in voyeuristically precise gynaecological detail, about Mancini’s vaginal reconstruction surgery in Las Vegas. For a fair few pages, a mafia soap opera turns into a medical textbook.
Neither detour has any relevance to the story, which is why Coppola dispensed with them. In contrast, the future Don Vito’s early life in Sicily, then Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan, so beautifully evoked in the first two films, forms only a brief interlude in the novel and is placed far too late on in the text.
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If the structure is weird, the characterisation is perfunctory: food-crazy mamma; hothead eldest son; a surfeit of nymphomaniac women; cautious lawyer; paedophile movie mogul; jolly baker, etc. The sole character transformation — of Michael from law-abiding, all-American, college-kid war hero in 1945 into stone-cold revenge psycho-killer in 1946 — is cursorily handled, even though it drives the whole narrative. Then again, hey, this is pulp fiction: what do you expect?
Well, you expect violence, melodrama, men living beyond society’s rules and laws yet adhering to a personal code of honour — all that macho malarkey, and The Godfather delivers it spectacularly. As Puzo says of the participants in the big-boss sit-down meeting, “They were those rarities, men who had refused to accept the rule of organised society, men who refused the dominion of other men. There was no force, no mortal man who could bend them to their will unless they wished it.”
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That’s heady stuff when you’re 12 years old. I suspect, along with an, ahem, inflated view of what constitutes an acceptably sized penis, I took rather too much of that outlaw cod-philosophising to heart. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise it was idiotic.
Yet what elevates the book, what made it such a monster bestseller and why Puzo was hired to co-write the screenplay, is the author’s talent for dialogue. He can’t plot, he can’t develop character, his reach exceeds his grasp as a social historian, but he has a good ear for conversation and phrase-making. Hence “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse”; “Leave the gun, take the cannoli”; and “It’s nothing personal, it’s business”. These and other gems were Puzo’s main contributions to what became a cultural phenomenon. Coppola, Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, James Caan and Nino Rota (who wrote the score) did the rest.
