Book Review: Sicily

Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of Historyby John Julius NorwichRandom House, 2015Back in the 1960s, when renowned and best-selling historian John Julius Norwich was just starting out on his literary career, he visited Sicily for the first time and ended up writing a book about the Norman conquest of the island in the 12^th century. There followed dozens of other books, including very well-regarded histories of Venice and Byzantium. And now, in Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, he's returned to the place that's meant so much to him both personally and professionally – and the tone of his Preface is strikingly sad:

Today is my eighty-fifth birthday, and it may well be that I shall never return to Sicily. This book is therefore a valediction. Sad as the island may be, it has given me great happiness, and has provided the beginning – and, quite possibly, the end – of my literary career. The pages that follow are inadequate indeed; but they have been written with deep gratitude, and with love.

Those pages give a brisk and always-lively tour of the history of Sicily from its early encounters with the Greeks through its Roman occupation and on to the Byzantines, those invading Normans, Spain, France, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Mussolini. Norwich stresses that Sicily's story is far too vast to encompass fully in one volume, and he finds a quote from Goethe - “Sicily is the key to everything” - as an example of the warrant to tell the story in the first place. The fact that Goethe made such a comment about Rome, Greece, Voltaire, and a particularly scrumptious lunch (“This strudel is the key to everything”) need not necessarily invalidate it regarding Sicily, which has indeed been a fulcrum for some key world events.By his own admission, Norwich can only give glancing attention to those events. His book is only 300 pages long, so passages like this abound:

After the painfully complicated story of Sicily's Greek tyrants and of the Punic Wars which followed them, that of Sicily under Roman rule is relatively uneventful. There is no question of the Sicilians being “allies” or “half-citizens,” as the Romans used on occasion to call their semi-subject peoples on the mainland. The all-important fact was that they spoke Greek, not Latin; their island was thus not just a province but a foreign province, its people second-class citizens who paid their taxes and did as they were told. These taxes were severe but not crushing.

Leaving aside the hundreds of thousands of frustrated lives, the black-bottomed reservoir of misery that lies underneath a line like “these taxes were severe but not crushing,” there's also the simple fact that the “painfully complicated story” of Sicily and Greece takes up 17 pages of the book, whereas the Roman, Byzantine, and Arab part of the story combined takes up 24 pages. Readers familiar with this kind of hurtling survey (indeed, familiar with the one Norwich himself did, 2006's The Middle Sea, a 680-page history of the Mediterranean) will know to expect this, and perhaps those readers will do a bit of discreet hopping around from one era of interest to another.That would be a small shame, since Norwich's book gains a certain narrative momentum as it builds its story – although some of that momentum is spoiled a bit once the story moves into Sicily's squalid 20^th century, in which the island contracts a pernicious disease. The whole of Sicily is now thoroughly infected with this disease, dying of it, and known by it throughout the world – in fact, too often bragging about it throughout the world. Norwich captures this nicely in a quote from Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, speaking to the Italian Senate in 1925:

If by the word “Mafia” we understand a sense of honor pitched in the highest key; a refusal to tolerate anyone's prominence or overbearing behaviour … a generosity of spirit which, while it meets strength head-on, is indulgent to the weak and shows loyalty to friends … If such feelings and such behaviour are what people mean by “the Mafia” … then we are speaking of the special characteristics of the Sicilian soul; and I declare that I am a mafioso, and proud to be one.

Even a century ago, such rhetoric was a bitter joke at the Sicilian people's expense, and things have only grown worse as the 20^th century worlds of film and prose worked overtime to glorify what Norwich repeatedly – and not always apparently ironically – refers to as “The Honored Society” alternate description of which might counterbalance Orlando's lying bluster with the simpler “If we disagree with you, we murder you”). That “Honored Society” has been an omnipresent blight on the lives of the ordinary Sicilian people who are put forward by Norwich as the true heroes of his story. He ends that story on a happy note, with a prosperous Sicily enjoying its favored status as a semi-autonomous part of the Italian Republic. He might have added that in the last two decades Sicilian officials and business owners have taken unprecedented steps to rid themselves of the cancer that's gripped their society in one incarnation or another for hundreds of years - and that winds its way persistently through this book while bigger, more dramatic events are unfolding center stage. Perhaps Norwich should return in a year or two and write a postscript – it would be every bit as urbane and knowledgeable as this compact history, but it might have a more pleasant end-note.