Below The Beltway

I’m usually not a fan of reading books based on movies I’ve already seen, especially ones that I’ve seen enough times that the images from the movie are indelibly etched in the brain. It’s for that reason that, even though I’ve seen The Godfather, The Godfather, Part II , and, yes, even The Godfather, Part III , I was reluctant to actually sit down and read Mario Puzo’s 1969 novel which started the whole saga, partly because I thought it would disappoint me, and partly because I thought that my near-photographic memory of the movies would in some sense ruin the book which was, of course, written well before Brando, Pacino, Duvall, and Caan ever picked up a script.

Boy, was I wrong.

While it’s impossible to read about any member of the Corleone family without seeing the actors that portrayed them, or to read through the chapters about, say, the Connie Corleone wedding scene, without remembering how it was portrayed in the movie, that really doesn’t detract at all from the experience of reading what turned out to be a very good book.

For the true Godfather fan, of course, the interesting thing to note are the differences between the book and the movies (plural because there are elements of the novel that show up in both The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II ). Some of them are understandable, such as the amount of time that Puzo takes up telling the back stories of characters such as Bonasera the undertaker and Johnny Fontane, because they would have made the movie much longer and more difficult to make. Others are more like little continuity errors; for example, in the book Michael and Kay’s children are both boys, in the movie they are a boy and a girl, in the book you Vito was an only child, in the movie he had an older brother who had been murdered in a Mafia vendetta. There are several others, of course, including the fact that some of the movies most famous lines don’t appear in the book at all.

On the whole, though, Puzo does a fabulous job of letting us into the world of the Corleone family and, while some have accused the films of romanticizing organized crime, a bogus charge in my opinion, you certainly can’t accuse the books of doing that. Yes, Vito Corleone comes across as something of a noble figure who believes he’s only doing what he needs to do to project his family, but the lie behind that becomes apparently pretty quickly and, when his youngest son takes his place, it becomes blatant.

Even if you’re not a fan of the movies, this is a great read. If you are a fan, it’s an essential one.