The Godfather, by Mario Puzo
The Godfather, by Mario Puzo
Hagen understood that the policeman believes in law and order in a curiously innocent way. He believed in it more than does the public he serves. Law and order is, after all, the magic from which he derives his power, individual power which he cherishes as nearly all men cherish individual power. And yet there is always the smoldering resentment against the public he serves. They are at the same time his ward and his prey. As wards they are ungrateful, abusive and demanding. As prey they are slippery and dangerous, full of guile. as soon as one is in the policeman's clutches the mechanism of the society the policeman defends marshals all its resources to cheat him of his prize. The fix is put in by politicians. Judges give lenient suspended sentences to the worst hoodlums. governors of the States and the President of the United States himself give full pardons, assuming that respected lawyers have not already won his acquittal. After a time the cop learns. Why should he not collect the fees these hoodlums are paying? He needs it more. His children, why should they not go to college? Why shouldn't he himself get the sun with a winter vacation in Florida? After all, he risks his life and that is no joke.
Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of The Godfather regularly gets high positions on lists of the greatest movies ever made, and rightly so. I respected Coppola's masterpiece the first time I saw it, and I respect it all the more now that I've seen the raw material he had to work with. Puzo's book sucks!
I can't help feeling a little sorry for Puzo. He's in the unique position of having his own original words come across as hackneyed cliches because the blockbuster media adaptation made better use of them, and inspired further use of them in a whole genre of derivative Organized Crime Family movies and TV shows. Puzo's primary purpose was to explain mafia culture and ethics as he understood them to a world that, in 1969, was unfamiliar with it but which now has largely accepted the stereotype as thoroughly as they've accepted the stock Hollywood sitcom family, police partnership and wartime army platoon. Puzo explains 'the code' in painstaking detail when we already know it.
Puzo can't do what Coppola and his all-star cast do. His antihero Don Vito Corleone jarringly wavers between being a larger-than-life force of nature who dominates all around him and being a feeble old man with multiple crippling physical and psychological wounds. His elder son is such an uncontrollable rage machine that it is astonishing that any capable family would trust him with real power, and the younger son's transformation from appalled distance from the family's business to ruthless head of the clan is without a satisfying rational basis. We're just supposed to accept that it happens because it's a Sicilian thing, it's what they do. Possibly the real central character is Tom Hagen, the family's "director of operations", who is most compelling because he plays his cards close, lets nothing show, and therefore succeeds as an enigma. Puzo might have done better to write the Corleones in the same style, instead of with the ham-fisted prose purporting to describe their states of mind. Coppola's most famous scenes--the horse head "offer he can't refuse", the tollbooth shooting, the massacre of the five families--are described with none of the vividness you'd expect, and Puzo's constant attempts to play with time--surprising the reader with the news of a major character's death, for example, and then going back and describing the events leading up to that death--are a technique that Coppola rightly discarded and that Quentin Tarantino studied much later as examples of what not to do.
Finally, Puzo invests a lot of energy (distracting from the action plot to do so) in arguing the thesis that Don Corleone is a good guy. He presents the stereotypical ironic politeness with which mafia hoods threaten their victims as if it were actual politeness and concern. Nothing to be afraid of; the Don just wants to make friends, and friends do one another favors. No hard feelings if you turn him down, oh no, no. He'll just send a few of the boys to persuade you of the true wisdom of his position, is all. The Don cares about you. He takes care of his own. He makes the trains run on time, and his use of force is ethically no different from what any government does. Of course. And if you don't see it that way, why you just don't understand Sicilians, which is just fine. Maybe a couple of big guys will be along to help you understand. I'm not sure whether Puzo really believed that philosophy, or if he represented it as such out of fear that he might faces some Sicilian displeasure if he represented otherwise. Either way, the digressions about Vito's avuncular kindness made my skin crawl.
See the movie; ignore the book.
Hagen understood that the policeman believes in law and order in a curiously innocent way. He believed in it more than does the public he serves. Law and order is, after all, the magic from which he derives his power, individual power which he cherishes as nearly all men cherish individual power. And yet there is always the smoldering resentment against the public he serves. They are at the same time his ward and his prey. As wards they are ungrateful, abusive and demanding. As prey they are slippery and dangerous, full of guile. as soon as one is in the policeman's clutches the mechanism of the society the policeman defends marshals all its resources to cheat him of his prize. The fix is put in by politicians. Judges give lenient suspended sentences to the worst hoodlums. governors of the States and the President of the United States himself give full pardons, assuming that respected lawyers have not already won his acquittal. After a time the cop learns. Why should he not collect the fees these hoodlums are paying? He needs it more. His children, why should they not go to college? Why shouldn't he himself get the sun with a winter vacation in Florida? After all, he risks his life and that is no joke.
Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of The Godfather regularly gets high positions on lists of the greatest movies ever made, and rightly so. I respected Coppola's masterpiece the first time I saw it, and I respect it all the more now that I've seen the raw material he had to work with. Puzo's book sucks!
I can't help feeling a little sorry for Puzo. He's in the unique position of having his own original words come across as hackneyed cliches because the blockbuster media adaptation made better use of them, and inspired further use of them in a whole genre of derivative Organized Crime Family movies and TV shows. Puzo's primary purpose was to explain mafia culture and ethics as he understood them to a world that, in 1969, was unfamiliar with it but which now has largely accepted the stereotype as thoroughly as they've accepted the stock Hollywood sitcom family, police partnership and wartime army platoon. Puzo explains 'the code' in painstaking detail when we already know it.
Puzo can't do what Coppola and his all-star cast do. His antihero Don Vito Corleone jarringly wavers between being a larger-than-life force of nature who dominates all around him and being a feeble old man with multiple crippling physical and psychological wounds. His elder son is such an uncontrollable rage machine that it is astonishing that any capable family would trust him with real power, and the younger son's transformation from appalled distance from the family's business to ruthless head of the clan is without a satisfying rational basis. We're just supposed to accept that it happens because it's a Sicilian thing, it's what they do. Possibly the real central character is Tom Hagen, the family's "director of operations", who is most compelling because he plays his cards close, lets nothing show, and therefore succeeds as an enigma. Puzo might have done better to write the Corleones in the same style, instead of with the ham-fisted prose purporting to describe their states of mind. Coppola's most famous scenes--the horse head "offer he can't refuse", the tollbooth shooting, the massacre of the five families--are described with none of the vividness you'd expect, and Puzo's constant attempts to play with time--surprising the reader with the news of a major character's death, for example, and then going back and describing the events leading up to that death--are a technique that Coppola rightly discarded and that Quentin Tarantino studied much later as examples of what not to do.
Finally, Puzo invests a lot of energy (distracting from the action plot to do so) in arguing the thesis that Don Corleone is a good guy. He presents the stereotypical ironic politeness with which mafia hoods threaten their victims as if it were actual politeness and concern. Nothing to be afraid of; the Don just wants to make friends, and friends do one another favors. No hard feelings if you turn him down, oh no, no. He'll just send a few of the boys to persuade you of the true wisdom of his position, is all. The Don cares about you. He takes care of his own. He makes the trains run on time, and his use of force is ethically no different from what any government does. Of course. And if you don't see it that way, why you just don't understand Sicilians, which is just fine. Maybe a couple of big guys will be along to help you understand. I'm not sure whether Puzo really believed that philosophy, or if he represented it as such out of fear that he might faces some Sicilian displeasure if he represented otherwise. Either way, the digressions about Vito's avuncular kindness made my skin crawl.
See the movie; ignore the book.