Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres

“After the war...”

Whilst reading Captain Corelli’s Mandolin there stirred in me as much surprise as when I read Birdsong. It is a book about the devastating impact of war on young people in the early 1900s.

Pelagia is a beautiful teenager living on the island of Cephallonia. Brought up without a mother, her father has turned her into a forward thinking, intelligent young woman. Still, she falls easily for the charms of a local fisherman. When war tears them apart, she allows herself to become obsessed with his lack of response to her letters. Convinced that he has forgotten her, she forces herself to forget him.

Later in the war, after her fiancé has returned, admitted he cannot read and write and then disappeared to fight again, Pelagia meets Captain Antonio Corelli, who is placed within her home as part of the Italian occupation of her island. He is a man so full of charm that the locals refer to him as the ‘crazy captain’, and he falls absolutely in love with her.

When the Italians turn on the Germans and the British fail to evacuate them, Corelli and Pelagia are faced with their own mortality. The war brought them together and it is about to tear them apart. In a world in which war is everywhere, they are just one couple in millions trying to navigate their love through a world of destruction.

This book is, at heart, a love story. I fell in love with it almost immediately. The beginning is reasonably slow. You will find yourself waiting for Corelli to arrive and he doesn’t until almost a third of the way through, but towards the end it becomes entirely obvious why we needed to read about a time when Corelli did not exist in Pelagia’s life. It is so that we can fall in love with her father, with the gentle giant in the village, with the pets that she takes care of and the olive tree in her garden. It is necessary for us to fall in love with these things so that we can be devastated when everything is ripped apart.

I fell in love with Antonio Corelli and I think that it is very important that this happens when a woman reads a love story. I also found myself remembering those who were both young and old during the war, the alternative impact it had on their lives in relation to their age, the experiences they shared and the events that they witnessed. I cried and I laughed when I read it.

At the end I had learned some lessons. Like how important it is not to waste time. And how detrimental it can be not to tell the truth about the way that you feel. And how stubbornness can ruin lives. And how, even though we might grow old, we are always going to be the exact same people. Thirty-two pages before the end I started crying, and I didn’t stop until there were just two pages left. On those two I laughed. 

I recommend this book if you love Birdsong, romance novels or war literacy, but to be honest I think it’s a great book for anybody. I learnt stuff and felt stuff. I don’t know what more you could want from a novel. Highly recommended.