'L-Università Mafia'

Author: John P. Portelli

Publisher: Horizons Publications / 2026

Pages: 235

I would very much be led to suspect that there is much in this novel that is autobiographical, without knowing any details about the author's life.

The beginning is in Malta - the boy from a village in Malta who becomes determined to prove one of his teachers wrong. This teacher was very negative about the boy's - George's - grasp of English. He decides to migrate to Canada.

We are also provided with details about the boy's political ideas - though his family is Nationalist he has become a Labour supporter.

But when, years later, he gets a foothold in Mintoff's New University, which aimed to supplant the Old University, rife with corruption, he finds himself immersed in an atmosphere of back-stabbing and preferential treatment that would have done credit to the Old University.

Though we lived around the same years, I have no direct experience of the New University. I had, however, unfortunately a direct experience of the corruption at the Old University.

Anyway, George manages to get a scholarship in Montreal and thus we follow him as he travels all on his own and endures the Canadian winter and life at the University.

His leftist ideas grow stronger and he instinctively becomes friends with people who are similarly disadvantaged - black people, mostly - and with Isabel, who though white is very supportive and social-minded.

Malta recedes in the distance and, with some difficulty in getting used to the Canadian way of doing things, especially in academe, George's innate honesty and lack of false ideas about himself make him very popular among students and fellow academics.

Right from the beginning, however, he finds himself engaged in a long-running feud with Robert, who has all the vices that George shuns - racism, snobbery, etc.

George and Isabel get married and have children but George persists in working late and in worrying. As retirement looms, he realises he does not have enough time.

He is lured into coming back to Malta and he quite likes the new Malta.

But then Daphne gets killed and his Canadian wife, Isabel, refuses to live here.

The Mafia that he has been fighting all his life suddenly rears up its ugly head. But that's not the end of the story.

This will be the fourth book by the author that I will have reviewed after a book of poems, M and Fajza but it is easily the best so far.