Captain Corelli's Mandolin

'Captain Corelli's Mandolin'

S U M M A R Y

It is 1941, and a young Italian officer, Captain Antonio Corelli,arrives on the beautiful Greek island of Cephallonia as part of an occupying force. He is billeted in the house of the local doctor, Iannis and his daughter Pelagia. He quickly wins the heart of Pelagia through his humour and his sensitivity, not to mention his stunning ability on the mandolin. But Pelagia is engaged to Mandras,

a local fisherman who is away fighting with the Greek army. Despite her growing affection for Corelli, Pelagia continues to write to Mandras, but he does not answer. It transpires that he could not, since he is illiterate. But Pelagia takes this as a sign that their love is dead and

she gives herself to Corelli. Then there is the betrayal. Everyone, it seems, in a short space of time, is betrayed. In the autumn of 1943, the Allies invade Sicily instead of the Greek islands, and, in the eyes of the islanders, betray Greece; the Italian commander, General Gandin, betrays his men, the Germans betray the Italians; perhaps

Corelli even betrays Pelagia by leaving her. The full horror of war, international and then civil, comes home to all the characters, then is swept away by the tide of history. Pelagia and Corelli are apart and destined to remain so for half a lifetime. Pelagia thinks Corelli is dead, Corelli, visiting Pelagia secretly every year, thinks she is married.

Then, in 1953 a new horror hits the island - the earthquake. The events of that time replace the war in the islanders' collective memory. In some ways, they are more shocking than those in the war, because children abandon their parents, parents abandon their children as they rush from collapsing houses, and live with the guilt for ever after.

Pelagia grows old, thinking of her dead lover, but, in an ending of tremendous bathos, she discovers that he is not dead, just mistaken about her marital status. They have each lost a life, or simply lived one.

Louis de Berniиres shot to fame with this, his fourth novel, in 1994. There had been inklings of things to come a year before, when he was named as one of the twenty Best Young British Novelists in 1993, but little sign that de Berniиres would become a household name in his early years.

He was born in 1954. and had a varied education, including a period at the military training academy of Sandhurst. Before going to university to study Philosophy, he worked in Colombia as an English teacher for a year where, in his own words, he spent the days 'lounging around in rivers' . After doing a series of short-term jobs, he decided at the age of 28 to become a full-time writer. As he put it, he could 'sink or swim, and if I was going to swim I had to start writing. You can only rely on yourself in the end.'

He used his experiences in Colombia to help him with the fictional background to a trilogy which he published between