LOUIS DE BERNIERES arrives clutching a copy of the erotic thriller In the Cut by Susanna Moore, for his session with the New York novelist on erotica at the Sydney Writer's Festival. 'I've no idea what I'll say,' he says. 'The main problem with writing erotic scenes is the vocabulary is so limited and corny. One of my favourite ever sentences I found in one of those black-covered Mills and Boon books was something like, 'He thrust his proud manhood into her rich generosity'.' De Bernieres breaks into peals of laughter - so hard his belly quivers.
Wearing camel-coloured slacks, a cream shirt and dainty pearl cuff-links, de Bernieres, 49, is a self-confessed hedonist, with a cherubic face and twinkling blue eyes, prone to outbursts of searing wit and gleeful mirth. Even during one of his darker periods of writer's block, he once likened 'the pressure of trying to write a second best-seller to standing in Trafalgar Square and being told to get an erection in the rush hour'.
His best-known novel, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, is estimated to have boosted tourism to the Greek island of Cephalonia, where the novel is set, by 20 per cent. Since it was published a decade ago, more than three million copies have been sold, with translations in 24 languages.
Will Birds Without Wings, the novel he released on Thursday, match that success? 'What, get an erection?' He laughs. 'Yes. To begin with, I had a ghastly sense of fatalism that everybody was going to say it wasn't as good as Corelli. Now, I think it's probably better - although it may not be as cuddly or lovable.'
Birds Without Wings, 10 years in the writing, is about the inhabitants of a Turkish town whose lives are shattered by the collapse of the Ottoman empire. Fascinated with the Turkish accounts of Gallipoli, de Bernieres trawled through the Ottoman archives for his primary sources written in French (the diplomatic language), and spent two weeks in Gallipoli, where his maternal grandfather had fought and been shot three times in one day. Some 40 years later, still suffering from war wounds, his grandfather shot himself. 'A late casualty of the war,' says de Bernieres.
'Gallipoli was moving and made me feel very sad. Bones are coming to the surface everywhere and you have no idea whether they are French bones or Anzac bones, or British or Sikh. That makes you understand the fatuousness of nationalism because you can't tell the nationality of a bone. You can't tell if it is a Muslim or Christian, just a human bone.'