Anyone who has read Captain Corelli's Mandolin (1994) will be disconcerted by the first nine or so chapters of Birds without Wings: the adjectives have withered. On the opening page, we're told that being a Muslim makes you 'grave and thoughtful, dignified and melancholy', and that wine is 'a precious and sacred thing' to Christians. By Captain Corelli's standards, this is puzzlingly flat: why doesn't anyone have an 'errant and wrinkly cleavage' or an 'incipient and Hellenic beard'? And where are the 'stale but amiable pussycats', the 'demented and metaphysical' hangovers, the nights 'made sepulchral by the attenuated and dancing shadows'? By page 35, a 'portentous and dignified' priest has made an appearance, and on page 42 there's talk of religion's 'tendentious but unchanging certainties'. But it's hard to relax until page 44, where, in the space of three paragraphs, someone's 'intrinsic and extraordinary mystique' exerts a 'continued and insatiable fascination' on children whose 'resolute and stalwart' elders smoke in 'exemplary and companionable silence'. At this point, it's clear that Louis de Bernières is back in business, preparing to depict a few 'incandescent and illicit moments' of tenderness among the 'banal but vile atrocities' of history's 'prolonged and atrocious holocaust'.

LRB 2 September 2004 | PDF Download