Mandolin Overboard

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Pity the plight of the super bestseller. Louis de Bernières was 39 when his fourth novel, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, became a surprise global phenomenon, selling around 3.5 million copies in 24 languages. Now, at 49, he's just getting around to publishing the follow-up, Birds Without Wings (Secker & Warburg). What has he done in the intervening decade? A few short stories, a biblical preface, and a lame children's novella called Red Dog. With his fans clamoring for more of the same, and detractors eager to prove him a one-hit wonder, it's little surprise that he told a reporter in April 2001 that writing after Corelli was like "being stood stark naked in Trafalgar Square and being told to get an erection." Britain's Daily Telegraph went so far as to call the release of his new novel "the adult equivalent of the launch of a Harry Potter book." That's a lot of pressure, and unfortunately de Bernières doesn't live up to it.

The book's setting is promising enough. De Bernières' first four novels were all set in picturesque but war-torn corners of the world — Latin America or, for Captain Corelli's Mandolin, the Greek island of Cephallonia. And so Birds tells of the pretty, fictional Turkish coastal town of Telmessos during and after World War I. Greeks and Turks live harmoniously there until 1923, when aggressive expansionism and horrific fighting between the two nations culminates in a population exchange — Turks deported to Turkey, Greeks to Greece. The main plot, such as it is, is the violent sundering of these people, who had considered themselves simply Ottomans, into two fiercely nationalistic camps.

So far, so good. But Birds Without Wings never really takes off from there, partly due to a dizzying flock of principal characters, many with no personal relationships between them. One chapter, for instance, gives you a long first-person commentary from traveling businessman Georgio P. Theodorou, who is rarely glimpsed again. The next is a third-person history lesson about the plots and machinations of Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Then come the musings of beautiful but simple Telmessos resident Philothei. Three chapters about people who are thousands of miles apart and will never meet. There are 625 pages and 101 chapters of this sort of cross-cutting. It's enough to make you want to throw the book across the room — except that it's heavy enough to knock someone out.

De Bernières has lost sight of what made his last book a smash: a yearning, forbidden relationship between two heroes. Instead, he gives us a dizzying flock of principal characters

De Bernières has lost sight of what made his last book a smash. It wasn't the exotic locale or political weight; it was the yearning, forbidden relationship between the two heroes, the betrothed Pelagia and the enemy soldier Corelli. De Bernières is an ardent storyteller, but not a good one. His structure is all over the place. He has said that he writes chapters out of order, as and when he feels like it, only later fitting them all together — and it shows. But what he can do is evoke the magic of the moment. The book's most interesting character is Rustem Bey, the powerful community leader whose wife is unfaithful and, once saved from stoning, condemned to prostitution. Years later Bey visits his now-diseased wife in a brothel: "He … put his hands on her head, as if in benediction," and in the simple gesture lies forgiveness, shame, reconciliation and, still, love. It's fleetingly moving, but a fragmented subplot in a book of subplots.

Perhaps most unwelcome is the book's heavy-handed preachiness. Rustem Bey darkly announces: "If a war can be holy, then God cannot." What's unmistakable is the lesson for today. Muslims and Christians? Holy war? The message is loud and clear — play nice. But with a narrative as lumpy as melting feta, that's not enough to hold our interest. Ten years of tinkering have resulted in an overlong book with trademark flashes of high emotion splattered among a disjointed cast of characters — sensibility without much sense. It may be hard for any author to hear, but what we truly want from De Bernières is a little less.