Generally speaking, the modern novel is not so much an art form as a predicament. When belief in man as the rational animal wavers, as it often does in modern fiction, one or the other of two extremes predominates: angelism (the self-regarding, purely intellectual world of ideologies, doctrinaire feminism, labyrinths, hypertrophied sensitivities, stories within stories within stories) or bestialism (radically purposeless lust and violence). The result is a loss of true imaginative power in spite of the emotional, intellectual, and literary force of a given work. We get many fictions that are, in a word, effete.

You could not apply that term to Mario Puzo's The Sicilian. Puzo's deliberately commercial success with the bestial in The Godfather may lead many readers to assume that his new novel merely continues in the same vein. They would be mistaken. There is no gratuitous sex or violence here. Puzo has returned to some of the richer human material that won him critical acclaim for his early novels. He loses little of his basic animal vigor in The Sicilian, but he uses it in the service of a wider vision than might be expected.

The first sign of this intention is his successful creation of a believable and genuinely good character in Turi Guiliano, the Sicilian of the title. The character Guiliano, based in part on a historical figure, begins his rise to public notoriety in 1943 at the age of twenty. The Fascists have just been driven from Sicily by the American liberation forces, and the Mafia is still weak from Mussolini's harsh repression. Little by little, however, the "Friends of the Friends," as the Mafia was known in Sicily, are beginning to insinuate themselves back into power by scheming to have Mafiosi appointed to replace ousted Fascist politicians. The strict rationing laws of the new government and the black market to which they have given rise are the source of lucrative Mafia rake-offs. Official corruption, the collusion of the Sicilian nobility and the Church, and the shrewdness of Don Croce Malo (the top Mafia leader) are establishing oppression that is at least as bad as anything the Sicilian people have ever experienced.

Guiliano and a boyhood friend are caught one day on a mountain road smuggling cheese, hams, and sausage, in contravention of the rationing laws, for a village engagement party. Smuggling is so common that the authorities usually do not pay much attention to it, but this time a brutal policeman shoots Guiliano—who, however, manages to kill the policeman in spite of a serious wound.

Until this incident Guiliano had been an attractive and charismatic boy. Like many Sicilian children he had been brought up on the romantic exploits of Charlemagne and Roland in the puppet theaters. Guiliano had also been an avid reader of literature, history, and philosophy. Now, in this fluid post-Fascist period, as he hides from the police, his imagination catches fire and he dreams of liberating Sicily from her several exploiters. He hides out in the mountains and becomes a Robin Hood figure.

Not only does he steal from the rich and give to the poor, thereby winning for himself widespread support from the peasants, but he distinguishes himself for the nobility and honor with which he conducts business as a gentlemen bandit. Those he is forced to kill he allows time to make their peace with God; he also often promises support for their widows and children. Those he kidnaps for ransom to help the poor come to admire him. His political maneuvers—like several of his kidnappings—are accompanied by eloquent letters to the newspapers explaining his actions and his aims of freeing the Sicilian people.

His chief opponent in all of this is Don Croce Malo, nick-named the Good Soul. The Don is the subtle but dark intelligence that broods over the island government, the local Church, and even relationships with the government in Rome.

The Mafia in Sicily is not exactly the same as the organization that goes by that name in the United States. In Sicily, the Mafia gradually grew out of the banding together of various leaders, like Guiliano, who sought to protect themselves and the people by establishing a parallel system of justice. Later the Sicilian Mafia itself became an exploiter by using the powers that be as screens for its own operations, though it still served to remedy some wrongs that the system would not right.

Thus, though the Don comes to admire Guiliano and would like to make him heir to the Mafia empire, Guiliano in his idealism wants nothing to do with him. The two become locked in a struggle, probing one another's weaknesses in an elaborate political and moral dance of death.

Stripped to its bare essentials, Puzo's story reads much like many another adventure tale. In many respects it is. Puzo's art is a popular one with few literary pretenses. (One session at this year's Modern Language Association convention in Washington, D.C., was devoted to "The Authority and the Signifier: [Roland] Barthes and Puzo's The Godfather." Let us hope this does not signal the swallowing up of Puzo by the academic amoeba.) But The Sicilian, besides being simply a darned good read for its action and intrigue, has far stronger characterization, deeper insight, and more simple zest than most adventure stories.

For example, all the action takes place against a highly colored landscape that Puzo occasionally succeeds in making evocative. Greeks, Latins, Carthaginians, Arabs, Normans, and others have left their mark on the Sicilian countryside, and it is fitting that the struggle between Guiliano and the Don culminates amidst the ruins of the Acropolis of Selinus, one of the better-known archaeological sites one the island. The setting of the whole novel suggests recurring human tragedy in a long-fallen world.

Puzo's value as a writer does not consist in verbal niceties, but in the vitality he is able to capture in every character and in his whole story. There are some people who will dismiss this novel as "macho" posturing. (Sicilian culture is not macho, but merely possessed of strongly defined familial and social roles.) The same people will probably profess admiration of African art for its primitiveness. The Sicilian is hardly sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, but neither is it seeking refuge from sterility in the dark gods of the blood. In it the animal and the rational still exist in some kind of vital balance—not a subtle or surprising world, but an essential point of reference nonetheless.

Hilaire Belloc once suggested that if you are looking for the opposite of sentimental, try Villon. If you are looking for a current opposite of effete, try Puzo.