Ramblings

Spoiler alert: “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” is a superb book. If you haven’t already, you should read it before looking at this short post. However, “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” is a terrible film. Nicholas Cage completely wrecked it. Don’t bother.

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (US Corelli’s Mandolin) by Louis de Bernières was hugely successful when it was published in 1994: I remember twice finding myself seated opposite fellow passengers on the Metropolitan Line reading the same book. You can even see Hugh Grant reading it at the end of Notting Hill, dammit. It is set in Cephalonia during the Italian and German occupations in the second world war. I loved its characters, its vivid sense of place, the ways its fragments came together, and its page-turning and emotionally charged plot. I was very invested in the characters: would they make it through to their happy endings?

But a passage after the halfway mark – in chapter 43, The Great Big Spiky Rustball – brought me to an abrupt halt. Corelli has just detonated a mine on the beach.

“Of the aftermath of this episode there is much to be said. Corelli was deaf for two days, and suffered the most extreme mortification at the thought of losing his music forever. For the rest of his life he would suffer periods of tinnitus, an enduring souvenir of Greece.”

Did you get that? For the rest of his life. Enduring. Much of the thrill of the story had been the jeopardy: would Corelli make it through the war alive? This dropped away in an instant. We must assume that our hero survives the war: the rest of his life, and enduring strongly suggest that he lives for many more years. And indeed, the ending shows him alive and well in 1993.

I continued to read the book with enjoyment, but a large part of the dramatic tension had vanished. Why would an author write that – to reassure the reader? Why would an editor let it through? Surely other readers would have noticed? No-one else has mentioned it. I read slowly but carefully – so, just me then?