Love goes begging

I was astonished by the huge success of Louis de Bernières’ Captain Correlli’s Mandolin which I staggered through back in 1994. Many separate passages were colourfully and beguilingly written, but the book as a whole was confusing and over- written, as if the author couldn’t bear to stop. I haven’t read any others since, and didn’t relish reading his latest, though I was encouraged to find it a mere slip of a volume compared to Captain Correlli’s’ adventures — and Christian a very different kind of hero.

A medical salesman, he believes that marriage turns wives into sisters and sex soon dies out, a painless castration. If you call your wife the Great White Loaf with skimmed milk running through her veins, as Christian does, and frequently find her snoring in curlers wearing her nylon nightie with She magazine in her lap opened at the problems page, any lust, perforce, curdles. He adores prostitutes, seeing them as ‘fantastically exotic’ or, more realistically, ‘like being friends with a cobra or a conger’. He sees Roza from his car and, thinking she is one, stops. She is amused at his mistake. But was it? He goes back.

There in the basement of the ramshackle old house where she lives in the filthiest kitchen he has ever seen, Christian sits nursing a black coffee, scarcely able to see Roza through the fug of her non-stop smoking, and listens for many chaste and wonderstruck afternoons as this magical Scheherazade spins her yarn. She was the daughter of a partisan who fought alongside Tito and she’d read Mathematics at Zagreb university, being groomed for an outstanding academic career. But she is a wild, self-destructive creature with no sense of consequence.