The London Times trashes The Godfather: The Lost Years  by Mark Winegardner,
a college professor from Florida who won the right to write this book in a contest.

Sicily remains what Puzo made it: a primitive land of cardboard peasants honour-bound to perpetuate an eternal cycle of vendettas.

Winegardner’s "The Lost Years" gives the cardboard peasants one last outing. He tells us that, “For a Sicilian, whose mother tongue is the only one in the Western world that lacks a future tense, the past and the present are as one.” Which would be intriguing — if it were not arrant tosh.

To judge from The Lost Years, it is not Sicily that has no future, but the whole Godfather mythology. In 1969 Puzo inadvertently founded a genre by decapitating a racehorse. In 2004 Winegardner has deployed greater craft than his predecessor in the cause of flogging a dead nag.

The Godfather: The Lost Years
by Mark Winegardner
reviewed by John Dickie

The London Times
November 27, 2004

A staggering 21 million copies of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather have been sold since it was first published 35 years ago. Before his death in 1999, Puzo himself authorised a competition to find his successor — someone to write another episode in the Corleone saga. And so now, thanks to the competition winner Mark Winegardner, the air is once again thick with the smell of spaghetti sauce and a “glowing pinkish grey mist” of atomised brains. Peddling its family-sized helpings of ethnic cliché and garish violence, America’s favourite criminal franchise is back in business.

But Puzo’s was not an easy bequest. In The Sicilian and Omertà, even he failed to re-create the explosive pulp chemistry of the original. Francis Ford Coppola’s film trilogy, for which Puzo co-wrote the screenplays, made the job even harder. The movies gave The Godfather gravitas, shaping Puzo’s gore-and-sex pageturner into a sombre evocation of the American dream’s underside. The slew of Mafia films that ensued even usurped the Western’s role in national mythology.

If the fuss around the The Godfather: The Lost Years is anything to go by — Puzo’s heir was presented on television — America’s love for the Corleone clan still lingers. Any new Godfather novel would have got a flying start in the bookshops — whatever its faults or merits. As it turns out, this new thriller is written with no little skill and ingenuity. But it could never have fulfilled its impossible brief.

Thirty-five years after The Godfather, the Mafia has all but exhausted its potential to encapsulate the country’s fears and desires. With the magnificent Sopranos losing momentum as it enters its final series, it could be that the US is finally ready to de-mob.

The Lost Years is carefully slotted into the chronological gaps either side of The Godfather II. Between 1955 and 1959, the new don Michael Corleone begins to move his empire out west, to Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe, and deals with his feckless brother Fredo. Then in 1961-62 he collaborates with the CIA’s plans to assassinate Fidel Castro.

The Missing Years wires these time periods together most successfully through Michael’s tussle with Nick Geraci, a former boxer with a law degree — and the only wiseguy savvy enough to read the inscrutable Corleone boss’s mind. Less happily, Winegardner tries to pleach the Corleones into what passes for the history of the American underworld: the Castellammarese war (1931), the Allied invasion of Sicily (1943), the Apalachin meeting (1957) — these dates are as familiar as 1066 for
Mafia-spotters. [RAA: What happened in 1066?- See Below]

Similarly clumsy is the attempt to expand the roman à clef element in Puzo’s tale. As every Mafia buff knows, the Johnny Fontane character in The Godfather was a dig at gangster wannabe Frank Sinatra. The Missing Years turns one in-joke into a full-scale name-swapping game. But there is little fun to be had in picking out the Rat Pack, Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedys from under their transparent disguises.

There are some neat turns in Winegardner’s plotting, and even the odd page worthy of Coppola’s cinematic vision: notably when guests at a breakfast cabaret watch a nuclear test from the roof terrace of a Vegas casino. But Winegardner is also repeatedly forced to go back over the Puzo-Coppola plot and fill in information about the real Mafia that we did not have back in 1969: the initiation ritual, the Commission, the formal hierarchy. The impression is of a book assembled from footnotes, not only to the Godfather saga, but to a whole true-crime library.

Winegardner’s problem is not just our jaded palates; it is that judicial investigations have taught us far more about the Mafia than we understood when The Godfather first appeared. Puzo could plausibly portray an Italian-American blood family (comprising fratelli, cugini and zii) while confusing it with a Mafia family (the murderous gang of consiglieri, soldati, and a capo di tutti i capi). In the real Cosa Nostra, we now know, these two things are distinct. In other words, what Puzo got wrong in his picture of the Mafia was precisely what he got right in his blockbuster family saga. This fortunate error gave The Godfather its central appeal: upstanding US family men could feel dangerous and clever by identifying with a criminal patriarch.

If the American Mafia cult is indeed in terminal decline, there is much to mourn about its passing. But there is plenty to celebrate too — particularly for anyone who views the Mafia phenomenon from an Italian perspective. For in all the three and a half decades of films, novels and exposés that sprang from the Godfather’s loins, there is not a single compelling and convincing scene set in Sicily.

Of course, American popular culture has always been unable to grasp that foreigners have an identity of their own — and powerful stories to go with it. But of all places, Sicily could surely have been an exception to this rule. After all, the sworn association of killers with which the US became besotted was born in Sicily a century and a half ago. The Mafia’s history involves a constant traffic in personnel, ideas and contraband across the criminal Atlantic. And yet despite all this narrative potential, the best that the American Mafia industry ever mustered was the sentimental episode of Vito Corleone’s youth in The Godfather II.

Whenever American writers or film-makers land in Sicily, they seem to hand in their imaginations at customs. For them, the island remains what Puzo made it: a primitive land of cardboard peasants honour-bound to perpetuate an eternal cycle of vendettas. And while the stereotypes about Sicily were being churned out in the States, some moving, gripping and highly realistic Italian films about the Mafia went without the audience they deserved.

Winegardner’s The Lost Years gives the cardboard peasants one last outing. He tells us that, “For a Sicilian, whose mother tongue is the only one in the Western world that lacks a future tense, the past and the present are as one.” Which would be intriguing — if it were not arrant tosh. To judge from The Lost Years, it is not Sicily that has no future, but the whole Godfather mythology. In 1969 Puzo inadvertently founded a genre by decapitating a racehorse. In 2004 Winegardner has deployed greater craft than his predecessor in the cause of flogging a dead nag.

THE GODFATHER: The Lost Years
By Mark Winegardner
Heinemann; £16.99; 400pp
ISBN 0 434 01213 0

Times Online - Books
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/
article/0,,923-1374688,00.html

BBC - History - The Battle of Hastings
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/
war/normans/hastings_01.shtml

1066 was also a year of the appearance of Haley's Comet.