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Community control: The Sacco Gang & Milkman

21/7/2018

6 Comments

 
I recently read a translated novella set in 1920s Sicily followed by a novel set in 1970s Northern Ireland. Both evoke the difficulty of leading a moral life in a society in which power has been wrested from the official representatives of law and order into a highly organised but politically unaccountable alternative body, and the stresses on ordinary people of such a regime. In the first, it’s the Mafia that controls the populace; in the second, the paramilitaries, including the IRA.


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The Sacco Gang by Andrea Camilleri translated by Stephen Sartarelli

Gun-toting outlaws given to looting, hold-ups, burglary and stealing livestock or a courageous band of brothers battling for what’s right? So asks Andrea Camilleri in this fact-based historical novella about the consequences of standing up to the Mafia in 1920s Sicily.
 
Through a combination of skill, good luck, and hard graft, Luigi Sacco transforms himself from hungry day labourer to wealthy landowner and patriarch of a close-knit family. Never forgetting their roots, the Saccos are generous to their neighbours and determined to live moral lives.
 
But socialism doesn’t sit well with the Mafia and, when he receives a letter demanding protection money, Luigi goes to the police. Although sympathetic, the authorities are powerless: no-one has ever dared defy the Mafia before.
 
As a threat level increases, compounded by assassination attempts and false accusations, the family’s resolve hardens. But what chance have they when the Mafia’s influence extends to the highest level while ordinary folk are terrified of incurring the terrorists’ wrath?
 
Based on a true story, the author of
The Revolution of the Moon demonstrates the devastation wrought by corruption in a simple, straightforward style. Although I’d have preferred more character depth, I enjoyed learning more about Italy’s Wild West. Like his aforementioned previous novel, The Sacco Gang is translated by Stephen Sartarelli and published in the UK by Europa editions to whom thanks for my proof copy.

Milkman by Anna Burns


The eponymous milkman is not a real milkman, but a creepy stalker who knows more about the eighteen-year-old narrator than she would like. Superficially friendly, he warns her against running through the park or walking home from work with her nose in a book. The strict tribal and gender code of 1970s Belfast makes it impossible to object.
 
Meanwhile, the gossipmongers have been at work, transforming a non-relationship into a scandalous affair. Her mother lectures her against getting involved with a man twenty-three years her senior, although she’s nagged her to get married and start producing babies since she turned sixteen. The paramilitary groupies, women turned on by the power of violent men, surround her in the nightclub toilets, showering her with compliments as if she’s one of them.
 
Against the odds, the narrator wants an ordinary life, loyal to the us while keeping the grisly consequences at arm’s length. Besides, she doesn’t even like the milkman, and hasn’t encouraged him in any way. But when he threatens, albeit indirectly, to do away with her maybe-boyfriend – whom she does like, despite his hoarding of car parts, including a Bentley that, if complete, would bear the wrong flag – she’s sucked in.
 
A culture in which so much is unmentionable, or even unthought, might be what leads the narrator to describe and explain in sometimes excruciating detail without ever naming names. This makes for an unusual voice, but an extremely uneconomical one, which, not only because I was conscious of the other novels waiting on my TBR shelf, I found frustrating until about one fifth of the way through.
 
But it does evoke the all-pervading atmosphere of anxiety such that a closed mind is so much safer than an open one, so that even observing a sunset is subservient in its denial of the rule that the sky is blue. And it can be funny in its quirkiness, where the rules of allegiance are so potent, there’s even a right and wrong kind of butter. Indeed, the further I got into the novel, the more I appreciated the humour, alongside the poignancy,
of the community’s resistance to what might be obvious elsewhere.
 
The oppression and mind control evokes
Stalinism and North Korea and, perhaps to a lesser degree, my own Catholic childhood “over the water” at a similar time. There’s also hope, particularly in the characters on the edges and, in the end, I found it a joy.
 
Thanks to Faber and Faber for my review copy. For another novel on The Troubles, see my review of
The Insect Rosary.
 
 

Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
6 Comments
Norah Colvin link
22/7/2018 11:05:27 am

Two novels set in difficult times. Perhaps the history portrayed in the Northern Irish story is still too raw for some so may need to be a little secretive or obscure. While things may have changed somewhat, attitudes can still be very ingrained. My hub emigrated from Belfast to Australia in the early 70s, partly because of "The Troubles". He was the only one of his family to do so, though.
The distance from the Italian history may make it easier to write without causing too much personal distress. Maybe. I'm wondering, thinking aloud.

Reply
Annecdotist
22/7/2018 12:51:17 pm

I wonder if your husband would enjoy this novel? I don’t think it’s the author being secretive about the past, but it’s the narrator showing – in quite a brilliant way, even if I found it frustrating initially – what it’s like to live in such a regime. Even living just “over the water” I’m sure I didn’t appreciate at the time how awful it must have been for the locals. I remember a friend who was from Belfast remarking about noticing a change in herself but not knowing what it was until she realised she didn’t feel anxious anymore.
And yes, it’s only very recent history. Now the border issue is becoming sensitive again with the Brexit negotiations. Very annoying as we should never have been in this position.

Reply
Norah Colvin link
23/7/2018 07:12:35 am

Hub's not a reader so wouldn't read it. I wonder how many and which demographics would. From my limited viewpoint, it seems each "side" has their own unalterable view of the history.

Annecdotist
23/7/2018 04:29:15 pm

It’s hard to get your head around how these allegiances go back hundreds of years.

Charli Mills
22/7/2018 04:55:01 pm

Both of these books sound like good reads because of the topics. I've had a fascination with the Sicilian mob, hearing whispers of it in childhood (I lived near Lake Tahoe where some of the famous families summered and up through the '70s the mafia controlled Nevada casinos). But I never really knew its origins.

The Milkman makes me wonder about shame as a way to mind control generations. Did that come up at all in the book? It seems that shame is often used to perpetuate sexual abuse, too and now I'm having a light bulb go off in thinking about the connects between the abuses in the Catholic Church and the Troubles in Ireland. I also don't like what I see in the US with different parties trying to "shame" the other or memes that shame Millenials for being apathetic and unrealistic. Just a thought...

Reply
Annecdotist
23/7/2018 04:28:14 pm

Interesting, Charli, I hadn’t thought about the US branch of the Mafia. But I suppose they would control the casinos. Just their kind of thing.
You’ve got me wondering about shame in this novel. It’s a big part of Catholicism, but it didn’t strike me so much as I was reading. Perhaps because shame was such a big part of my own upbringing it has to be particularly strong for me to notice it!
People were certainly ostracised for being individuals, but I suppose the narrator didn’t care so much what people thought until she approached the danger point. But the church certainly enabled some of the atrocities. (There’s an amusing bit where the church won’t allow a newly formed women’s group to use their premises but the IRA can use – not exactly the church itself but its outbuildings – for its kangaroo courts.) Shame is certainly one way of asserting control – alas not for some of those who need it most!

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