In both these novels Louis de Bernières first creates a portrait of ordinary life in some sort of peaceful, out-of-the-way place. In Corelli’s Mandolin (1994) the place is a Greek island in the early days of World War 2. In Birds Without Wings (2004) it’s a village in southwestern Anatolia during World War 1 and its aftermath. In both places, we meet characters who immediately engage our sympathy. We see their struggles with issues large and small. From the older people we hear about past joys and sorrows. Their children live in a kind of eternal present. Young people slowly come of age and begin to find their way. The details are tender and beautiful and remind us how wonderful life can be. We see how the members of the community are connected to one another, how they squabble with each other one day and support each other the next. Political and social abstractions have little value to these people, while tolerance and mutual respect have numerous practical advantages. A cynic might ask how de Bernières knows all this stuff. He didn’t live there in those villages. Shush. Never mind. You need to enjoy the miracle.
Especially you need to enjoy it because at some point de Bernières is going to change tack and tell you a about some other people, much more famous people, and what they were up to during those same years. These people are government leaders, actors on the geopolitical stage who are interested in conquest and control, people for whom political abstractions are extremely useful and for whom individual human lives matter very little. And then, inevitably, once we know a little about these people, de Bernières is going to tell what happens when the wars and the mass slaughters initiated by this group begin to affect the lives of the first group, those innocent ones, the nice people that the reader has come to love. It won’t be pretty. In fact, it will be awful. For some, it will be as bad as life can possibly get. Good people will die for little or no reason in an variety of horrible ways; others will be twisted into monstrous shapes or simply go mad. Some will survive, but all will suffer and none remain unscathed.
Sounds pretty depressing, eh? So why do I admire these two books so much? Because they are full of light. They are very funny and very romantic. That’s what keeps you reading and it’s also where all the light comes from. Plus you can learn some history from these books. You can learn about how a war that you’ve always known about had effects that you didn’t know about. And, amidst all this, you can learn about good and evil. That’s one thing that the light does; it makes it harder for evil to hide. It’s not that de Bernières provides some magic answer, an inspired way forward that will keep it all from happening again. No. But his stories can remind us what’s really behind the lies our leaders so often tell us, the fear, hatred, ego, greed and pure bone-headed ignorance that are normally what it takes to get a war started. The light can help us see understand where happiness and security really come from.
Of the two books, Corelli’s Mandolin is more immediately accessible, with unique and memorable characters, some broad humor, and an underlying historical setting that will not be totally unknown to most readers. Birds Without Wings tells of a lessor known and even more fascinating cultural milieu. Its philosophy is more nuanced, its ironies more open-ended. But both of these are books in the great tradition of novels. They are about individual people in very particular places and yet they also tell a story about everything else; they tell us how to live.