Louis de Bernières gets irritated when people talk as if 'Captain Corelli's Mandolin' is his only book. He tells Arminta Wallace about his new novel, which could change all that.
For a man who has outraged more socio-political lobby groups than you could shake a stick at, Louis de Bernières seems remarkably calm. "What is a club sandwich, anyway?" he inquires mildly, studying the bar menu at the Clarence Hotel. His writing often presents a similarly gentle, whimsical surface - which is why, when you mention Captain Corelli's Mandolin, people sigh and go all gooey and say "ahhhh".
Some people. Not everybody. Certainly not left-wing Greeks of the communist persuasion, who were outraged by the novel's portrayal of their activities during the second World War.
"Hmm," says de Bernières, who has eschewed the club sandwich in favour of something involving steak, mozzarella, sun-dried tomatoes and - appropriately enough - pitta bread. "But I don't feel I did malign them. It's just that, um. . ." He puts down his lunch and licks his fingers.
"Well, there was the Nazi terror. Then there was the red terror. And that was followed by the white terror, which was the right-wing reaction," he says, ticking off terrors on his now-clean digits. He ends the impromptu Greek history lesson with a beatific smile. "It just so happens," he concludes, "that in Corelli I didn't get round to the white terror."
Then there was the movie. True, Hollywood made a mess of it, playing up the love story, watering down the politics and adding an upbeat ending. But de Bernières didn't spare the moguls' blushes.
"It would be impossible for a parent to be happy about its baby's ears being put on backwards," was his rather too forthright verdict on the finished film. And what about his introduction to the 'Book of Job' in Canongate's book-by-book edition of the King James Bible? Now how could anybody cause trouble with that?
He chuckles. "It did cause a good deal of controversy," he explains, beaming. "Because there was a party of . . . well, of Christian fundamentalists who wanted to sue me for blasphemy. I said that God comes over very badly in that book; he comes over as a sort of manipulative megalomaniac who makes deals with Satan."
He shrugs, frowns. "Although sometimes the universe seems to be more explicable if God is nasty . . . I don't know. Anyway I had people turning up to my readings shouting 'blasphemy!' and singing hymns."
As the book was published in Scotland, which doesn't have a blasphemy law, the legal challenge petered out. Perhaps God has a more laconic sense of humour than is generally assumed. But de Bernières undoubtedly has a talent for stirring up outrage; and his new book, Birds Without Wings, deals with topics whose combined outrage potential is explosive.
Set against the background of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, it portrays a community torn apart by the "unholy spouses" of religion and nationalism. Composed as a series of tableaux, vividly presented by a series of larger-than-life narrators, Birds Without Wings is a storytelling tour de force which packs some of its strongest punches by means of simple counterpoint. Scenes of everyday domesticity in a rural village are followed by scenes of wholesale carnage at Gallipoli. An outrage committed by one historical side is echoed by another. And all the most sensitive issues - those guaranteed to make blood boil in the Balkans and beyond - are undoubtedly in there. De Bernières is counting on his fingers again.
"I could," he offers, "get into trouble with Greeks, Turks, Armenians and Kurds. I'll have to wait and see."
Meanwhile those who simply love reading are in for a treat. This enormous - 625 pages - novel is compelling from start to finish. It's funny and quirky and heartbreakingly sad. De Bernières has written a trilogy of novels set in Latin America and a book of children's stories set in Australia. But what makes a Londoner of Huguenot descent want to write about socio-political faultlines in the eastern Mediterranean?
"I like the Greeks and the Turks equally," he says. "And it perplexes me that their relations are so often very bad. But what started this book off, really, was seeing a Christian ossuary in an abandoned ghost town in south-west Turkey. Then I remembered reading in a Kazantzakis novel about refugees arriving from Anatolia with the bones of their ancestors in sacks on their backs. The whole idea came from that - from seeing a few Christian bones in an ossuary in Turkey."
He researched the book exhaustively, reading everything from old travel books through anthropological studies of Greek burial rites to biographies of Atatürk. He made several trips to the abandoned village and engaged in what turned out to be a highly personal odyssey to Gallipoli.
"My maternal grandfather was badly wounded at Gallipoli, and then wounded in a plane crash subsequently - so he had awful pain all of his life," explains de Bernières. "I remember him as a particularly sweet grandfather. He used to make me wooden toys, which I still have. But ultimately he shot himself. He thought he had lung cancer, when in fact he had emphysema - but it was partly to do with the pain he had all his life. When I went to Gallipoli I didn't really know how I was going to write about him, so what I did first was go everywhere he would have been. It was obvious, because you could find the tombs of his comrades from the Nelson battalion - there's a cemetery where every battle was. So I was doing that initially, and I picked flowers from each of the places to give to my mother.
"Then I went to the museum, and I realised that the obvious thing to do was tell it all from the Turkish point of view. Nobody had really done that in English before, and the Turks have lots of really interesting and intriguing stories. So I decided to tell those."
Some of the stories are amusing, such as that of bored soldiers sniping at each other across the lines for no particular reason, then holding up jaunty signs reading "hit" or "miss". Some, such as the episode in which a Turkish soldier carries a severely wounded English officer back to within reach of his comrades, are almost unbearably poignant. Are these for real?
"Well, that one is, I know, because it was witnessed by both sides," says de Bernières. "But there other things, to which there are no witnesses, which remain mysterious." The disappearance of several English battalions, for instance. "Just completely disappeared. No one knows what happened to them."
It would be a mistake to give the impression that Birds Without Wings is a war novel. War - indeed savagery of every kind - plays its part, but the book is a rich tapestry woven from the messy, untidy, complex material known as humanity. It is a stunning literary achievement, but you'd never guess that to hear de Bernières talk about its composition. He says he wrote it in chunks, whenever he felt like it.
"I wanted it to be made of interlinked short stories and novellas rather than a conventional novel with a linear narrative," he says. But didn't he have a grand plan? "The plan? I emptied out my living room and put all of the chapters on the floor and then walked between them, putting them into what seemed like a sensible order. Then I read the book and worked out what extra connections needed to be put in so it would all hang together. Because it really wasn't written in a sensible order. Although there are lots of tiny chapters about Philothei, for instance, and I wrote them one after the other - so obviously it was easy to keep track of her."
It will be interesting to see how Birds Without Wings is received. After all, the book de Bernières now refers to simply as "Corelli" was a slow-burner which, over several years, achieved cult status by word of mouth.
"Lots of people say to me 'I read your book', and of course they only mean the one book," he says. "I get kind of irritated and say 'well, which book?'."
The success of Captain Corelli's Mandolin has, of course, changed his life - but not in an entirely fairytale sort of way. True, he bought a Georgian rectory in Norfolk, where he now lives happily away from the literary limelight. But, as he ruefully notes, even Corelli money doesn't last forever, and the problem was how to follow it.
"I didn't want to write that book twice, obviously, so I had to let it settle down a bit," he says. "I wanted to leave time for my style to change, for my sense of humour to change. I didn't want to be repeating old tricks. In a way I felt that everyone was looking over my shoulder, either waiting to love it or waiting to hate it - which makes the writing more self-conscious. I wanted to try and write innocently. If the financial situation had been desperate, of course, I'd have had Birds Without Wings finished a lot sooner. But it would have been a different book."
Thank goodness it isn't, I mutter as I get up to go. We shake hands. Then, with a stricken look, de Bernières suddenly holds out one of the Clarence's pristine white linen napkins. For what - wiping off all traces of trouble, à la Pontius Pilate? He shakes his head and wiggles his fingers.
"Sun-dried tomatoes," he says, with a smile as winning as summer sunshine.
Birds Without Wings is published by Secker & Warburg, priced £17.99