I'm a sucker for books about the Mafia in Sicily up to about the capture of Toto Riina in 1993. As I turned the pages on Mario Puzo's book - which is about the bandit Salvatore Guiliano - I wondered why I had this fascination.
It’s a small, self-contained world with a handful of dominant characters, a supporting cast made up of sketched vividly people who play small but key roles in the lives of the main characters. The setting is a pre-industrial, unforgiving agricultural economy. It is a world where men risk their lives to defend their honour, and where justice is dispensed and disputes settled quickly and violently. The slightest gesture can be significant, the slightest phrase can be full of meaning. Everyone is poor, except a few capos and aristocrats. There are spies, traitors, loyal family members, corrupt officials, and barely competent policemen. There are secrets, hidden alliances and shady deals.
It is exactly the recipe for a story that can be told and re-told, each time with a different perspective. The facts are known, settled, and sufficiently past. The cast is small, their roles vivid, the setting full of weirdness. My favourite book about that era is Peter Robb’s Midnight in Sicily, which in part contrasts the events of those times with the conditions in Sicily in 1996, after the Mafia had been making money from drugs and was recovering from the famous Maxi-trial.
It is a story in which what people say and do can be a matter of life-or-death, in a place where simply managing to get enough to eat and drink is a lifetime struggle. Almost the opposite of our world now.
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