The Godfather Returns, also known as The Godfather The Lost Years,
is a novel written by Mark Winegardner, published in 2004. It is a sequel to Mario
Puzo’s classic 1969 novel The Godfather, and is one of several entries in this saga.
So there’s quite a few Godfather books,
surprisingly, let me give you a quick brief rundown.
So after Mario Puzo’s best selling original novel, he published a book in 1984 called The Sicilian,
based on the life of Sicilian bandit Salvatore Guiliano. The book is set in the same universe
as The Godfather, and even contains characters from the original book like Michael Corleone.
In fact, the book is set during Michael’s exile in Sicily,
after he shoots the drug dealer Solozzo and the police captain in the diner,
and part of the story involves Don Vito Corleone tasking Michael with assisting the famous bandit
Salvatore Guiliano escape Sicily and travel to America with Michael. This is the only
Godfather sequel written by Mario Puzo, the rest have all been written by other authors.
So why did I read and review the godfather, but skip the sequel, you ask? Well, I’ve heard a
lot about this book, I’ve heard that many people came away from it disappointed because it’s quite
different from the Godfather. It may be set in the same universe, but it’s not really a family drama,
a mob drama, it’s more of an underground, bandits living off the grid in the mountains kid of book.
I’ve heard people say that the Michael Corleone connection is shoe horned in due to the
Godfather’s popularity, with the book cynically selling itself as a sequel. But if you accept what
it is, I’ve heard it’s really good, and I might have given it a go, and I might still do one day,
only when I was doing my research into it to see whether it would be worth buying, somebody spoiled
the ending of it online, which kind of bummed me out. Hopefully I’ll forget one day, and then can
give the book a go. Let me know if you;ve read The Silcilain, and if you think it’s worth the read.
So the next book is this one, The Godfather returns.
In the 1990s, Mario Puzo was approached to write a sequel to The Godfather but turned it down,
but stated that he would not object to a sequel being written by another director after he died.
The Godfather Returns is the result, commissioned by Random House, publishers of the Sicilian,
who held a contest to select a potential book author, and Winegardner won.
It has a sequel called The Godfather’s Revenge,
also written by Winegardner. These books seem to have the backing of the Puzo estate,
however, to my knowledge Paramount Pictures, the studio that produced the Godfather films,
co-written by Mario Puzo, have declared the books as non-canon. So do with that what you will.
There is a fifth and final book, called The Family Corleone, published in 2012 and written by Ed
Falco. This one sounds quite interesting, because it’s a prequel to The Godfather and is based on an
unpublished screenplay by Mario Puzo himself. As Godfather fans might know, and I’ve done a
detailed video on this going through what the film would have been about, Mario Puzo
and Francis Ford Coppola were all set to write The Godfather Part 4, but then Puzo died, but a draft
of the script by Puzo does exists, and elements from it have been taken to formulate this book.
So, The Godfather Returns. A direct sequel to The Godfather.
So first things first, when is this book set, who is it concerned with, and what happens?
Well, I’m going to try to keep this simple, but it’s a little difficult,
because the book can be all over the place really.
It’s set directly after the first film, in which The Colreone family are making their
move to Nevada, and are leaving New York. This is quite interesting because one issue I see
people bring up is that if Michael Corleone took out the heads of the other 4 new York families,
why did no one retaliate? What actually happen next? Did the other families fight back?
Did the Corleones absorb the entirety of the new York mob?
How could they have possibly achieved that? Well the book looks to bring clarity to these issues,
and it highlights how the Corleone’s issues in New York were not sorted by the killings
of the other families at the end of the first book, there was more work to be done.
In fact, this is where the inception of the main plot comes from. Michael is scheduled to have a
sit down with some of his rivals, people who would like to see him dead. Rather than go himself,
he sends one of the top members of the Corleone family, the rising star Nick Geraci – or is is
Jeraci? I don’t know, in fact there’s even a paragraph in the book where a character
complains that everyone is always pronouncing it wrong. But anyway, Geraci can fly planes,
and he is the one who flies Michael’s rivals to the island where they have this meeting.
It’s only at the meeting he reveals himself as the representative of Michael Corleone.
Things are said, disagreements are had, hands are shaken and cheeks are kissed.
However, during the flight back, the plane malfunctions and is sent crashing into the sea,
killing all on board, killing all of the remaining opponents of Michael,
and it’s revealed that this was actually a set up, with Michael settling all family business,
and sacrificing a great asset in Nick Geraci. However, Geraci actually survives the crash,
and learns that Michael set him up to die, and he then secretly teams up with his old Don, who isn’t
part of the Corleones, to turn againt Michael and have his revenge. And things basically go
from there. Like with all the Godfather books and films, it borrows from reality,
like fore example there’s a character who becomes President of the United States who has
links to the underworld, and this of course is supposed to be based on John F Kennedy.
I personally don’t think the period between The Godfather 1 and The Godfather 2 is the
most interesting period to have your story set. And I say Godfather 2 because the movies
are clearly canon in the book, because the events of The Godfather 2
end up running concurrently with The Godfather Returns.
I would rather see what happened in between The Godfather 2 and The Godfather 3,
to witness the change in Michael’s character, to see all that happened in between those two
significant periods in his life. Maybe the sequel, The Godfather Returns, will touch upon that.
But anyway, this book ends up running side by side with The Godfather 2, it kind of
references the events in the film in the background without going into too much
details, and then it jumps forward to after the Godfather 2, which is a bit bizarre really. The
structure is awkward, like for example, Fredo Corleone is a major character in this book,
and then all of a sudden, he’s dead, and his death isn’t shown because the book author expects us to
have seen The Godfather 2 and seems to try his best to avoid mentioning the key parts of that
film as much as possible. The awkward structure is compounded with a seemingly random but interesting
flashback into Michael’s experiences in the marines, and then it jumps forward yet again into
the future with him trying to exit La cosa nostra and go straight, and all the issues with Nick
Geraci. I can’t say I’m a fan of the structure of the novel, it feels like it doesn’t know what it
wants to focus on at times, it jumps from here to there, and each of the sections of the book
where there is a significant time jump start off with telling us what year this chapter is set in,
but that doesn’t help, because most of us don’t know what year the events of each and every
event in the Godfather universe take place. As mentioned, one minute we were following
Fredo and the schenanigans he was getting up to, and the next minute, he’s already dead.
Winegardner has to dance around and avoid the stuff that is already covered in The Godfather 2,
but the thing is, those parts – the assassination attempt on Michael, Fredo’s death, all of these
kind of things, were the interesting parts of the movie, and he has to skip these things and
instead gives us painstaking details of stuff that we really don’t give a shit about. s
In terms of filling in the blanks, which is pretty much the purpose of the book,
in addition to creating a new antagonist in Nick Geraci for Michael to fight with,
The Godfather Returns does a decent job in places. All of the classic characters who made it to the
end of The Godfatehr return, Tom Hagen, Michael, Fredo, Kay, etc and we get some more peeks into
their characters. But I gotta say, and there’s no other way to say this, The Godfather Returns was
just so boring at times, it felt like it had no jest in it. Winegardner does his best to replicate
Puzo’s seductive prose, and at times he does well, there are passages which I thought were really
well written and seem straight out of the first book, but he times the book is equal
to its predecessor are rare, and Winegardner even imitates the things I DIDN’T like about
The Godfather. For example, Puzo waffled on and on at times about Johnny Fontaine, the mob connected
singer and actor, and I thought these passages in the book were decent but outstayed their welcome,
but it’s like Winegardner thought, Puzo did it, so I have to as well, and we get chapter after
chapter dedicated to the mundane life of Johnny Fontaine, all while some of the mosyt interesting
characters, like Tom Hagen who is almost the main character in the first book, are sidelined.
And speaking of boring, hardly anything even happens in this book. In terms of the Michael
and Geraci beef, no actual conflict ever takes place, it seems as though all of this has been
left for the sequel, I’m not joking, I was actually about 2 hundred pages into this 500 or so
pagebook and I was thinking, nothing’s even happened yet. Michael and Kay go on a holiday
that lasts for a good chunk of the book, and even then they have to turn around and go home because
they are denied entry into Sicily for safety reasons, we follow one of Sonny Corleone’s
daughters she goes to college and experience love, and Winegardner seemingly thought it was
a good idea to turn Fredo into a self-loathing gay all of a sudden. OK, the Francesca storyline,
Sonny’s daughter, was quite interesting, because it gives you a different perspective
of the mob life, a daughter who’s trying to get an education for herself in a WASPy world,
and struggles to shake of the stereotype of Italian Americans all being criminals. It reminded
me of Meadow Soprano, the daughter of Tony Soprano in the classic mob TV series The Soprano.
But, for comparisons sake, I mentioned in my review of The Godfather that I couldn’t put it
down, that I finished it in a few days. With this book, I was really into it but it just ran out of
puff, there wasn’t enough content to justify the length, and I really was reading it to
simply finish it, and yet ina crazy way the more I read the more longer the novel seemed to get.
I was really burnt out by the end, it just didn’t have the pull of Puzo’s book, there’s
all these hints that something big is about to happen, people are schimg and making plans,
but very little does actually happen and materialise is some good solid fiction.
One of the issues I have with it is the attempts to explain the context
and etail behind events that occur in the films. Some of it is cool and interesting, as mentioned,
the aftermath of the murder of the heads of the 4 rival families, but sometimes it’s too contrived,
it’s too tightly wound. Not everything needs to be explained, when some things are left open,
a story feels more organic, it feels more like real life, the world building is improved if
we feel as though the clock is ticking and the world is turning even when we’re not reading.
But in this book they try to make too many links, like fore xample Nick Geraci is the
one who set up Fredo Corleone with Johnny Ola for Fredo to unwittingly betray his brother. Like,
why do we need that, what was wrong with The Godfather 2 telling us that Ola bumped
into Fredo and got him to spill some beans about Michael. By having Geraci intentionally manipulate
Fredo so he inadvertedly betrays Michael so that Michael has to kill him and thus destroy himself
takes away from the poignance and trajedy of Fredo’s betrayal in The Godfather II.
But if Winegardner didn’t try and tie things with the movies and instead focused entirely on new
chatracters, we’d all probably say, where the hell are all the beloved characters? SO he’s jkind of
stuck and limited in having to insert his story around an existing framework using some characters
not created by him and others that are, and it doesn’t always work. Sometimes it does though,
with some of the more interesting aspects of the book being how Tessio died
and the relationship between Michael and Fredo pre-The Godfather II.
However, in a weird way, I can accept the book, and not just because, all things considered, it is
a decent read, but the thing is, because it isn’t written by Puzo, because Paramount don’t consider
it canon, it kind of feels like an alternate reality book, a fan fiction book, and in that
fan fiction kind of way, that “what might have been” kind of way, I can accept it. I can accept
it as one of the many possible scenarios that happened after the events of The Godfather. If
it was written by Puzo, I would probably be extra critical of it, analysing every page, highlighting
issues and saying “oh, that guy doesn’t didn’t act like that in the first book! This guy’s acting out
of character! Why is Tom Hagen swearing? Why is Fredo gay, when he used to bang cocktail
waitresses two at a time? Why is Michael joking around and laughing?” But, because it isn’t Puzo,
it’s a dude who won some competition, it comes off as fan fiction, for better or worse.
Aside from Geraci, I didn’t feel anything for the new characters established, in fact with several
of them, I completely forgot what their names were. You never get a feel of their personalities,
except the Chicago boss who is supposed to be wild, which is kind of a boring
cliché now of Chicago mobsters, but even the established characters like Michael and Tom,
sometimes, with the way they act and the way they talk, it’s difficult to visualise
Al Pacino and Robert Duvall acting it out. They just don’t feel like the same characters we know.
Overall I’d say the book is medicore and not very interesting. I found it an effort
to get through, and to be honest, I’m not really looking forward to
reading the sequel as much as I was before I bought the books