IT IS November 1327. The Franciscan monk from Oxford, accompanied by a Benedictine novice from Melk, arrives at an Italian monastery: ‘His height surpassed that of a normal man and he was so thin that he seemed still taller. His eyes were sharp and penetrating; his thin and slightly beaky nose gave his countenance the expression of a man on the lookout…’
When we hear that his name is William of Baskerville we at once suspect that he is a preincarnation of Sherlock Holmes, especially since he is coming to investigate a series of crimes at the abbey. We are convinced when he divines that a number of anxious servants are searching for the abbot’s strayed horse – ‘fifteen hands, the fastest in your stables, with a dark coat, a full tail, small round hoofs, but a very steady gait; small head, sharp ears, big eyes.’ He also guesses that the name of the horse is Brunellus. How, asks his Benedictine companion, can he know all this? Elementary, my dear Adso: ‘One of the blackberry bushes… still held some long black horsehairs in its brambles.’ And so on. And why, Brunellus? ‘What other name could he possibly have? Why, even the great Buridan, who was about to become rector in Paris, when he wants to use a horse in one of his logical examples, always calls it Brunellus.’
So we seem to have then a kind of game or joke, the transplantation of the sleuth of Baker Street to medieval Italy, not so much of a game or joke if you have read (which Dr Eco probably hasn’t) Owen Dudley Edward’s biography of Conan Doyle, in which he presents convincing evidence that Sherlock Holmes is the product of a Jesuit education. Of course, the Jesuits didn’t exist in William of Baskerville’s time, but – learned in Aquinas and Aristotle and prepared to use the empirical techniques of Roger Bacon – William would make a very good English Jesuit. Although in orders, he lacks the rotundity, Wildean paradoxicality and compassion of Father Brown, but clearly Dr Eco knows his Chesterton. Theology and criminal detection go, for some reason, well together.
The first crimes are purely theological – mere (mere?) heresy – but then monks start mysteriously to die. It takes Williams a good 490 pages to discover the single motivation behind what are obviously cold-blooded murders – he is a slower worker than Holmes and his creator is not writing for the Strand Magazine. Moreover, the motivation is of a subtlety that forbids even the most educated guesswork, and some of the clues are in Latin.
The novel is much too complex and interesting in its non-narrative substance to make a reviewer shy of disclosing the denouement. This has to do with a book in the abbey library which the librarian, who is blind and devout and not an obvious suspect, does not wish his fellow monks to see – or, if they do see it, they had better not survive. It is the lost second part of Aristotle’s ‘Poetics,’ in which the Stagyrite presents a rationale of the comic. Now as medieval theology was to some extent based on Aristotelian philosophy, there is a danger that Christianity may be corrupted by humour: if Aristotle gives it his blessing people may laugh at the Devil instead of fighting him. The librarian, Jorge, is sternly anti-Chestertonian. He is evidently not meant to be that other blind Jorge who, alas, has once again failed to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The pages of the forbidden book are impregnated with poison. When the reader licks his thumb to turn over the pages he deals his own death. William, naturally, wears gloves to read it. Jorge, his plot discovered, eats the book and dies horribly. Lamps fall and the library sets on fire. Soon the whole monastery is ablaze. The greatest store of knowledge in Christendom is destroyed. The Italian periodical Panorama has described this story as ‘perfidiously analogous to our times.’ The French Libération says that it is a ‘vibrant plea for freedom, moderation, and wisdom.’ I think they both mean that Eco is against humourless fanaticism.
As the reader will know, this novel has been a bestseller in every country where it has appeared. It was strange to see it heading the New York Times bestseller list, with John le Carré, Morris West, Norman Mailer and Jackie Collins limping behind. Its auguries (and its American advance) were no indication of great popularity. Dr Eco is a semiotician and a Joyce scholar; my own personal acquaintance with him has always been of an academic kind; nobody expected him to write a novel, let alone a runaway bestseller.
Everything in the book would seem to militate against a wide readership. It is erudite, crammed with Latin and curious theology, bristling with strange words, almost devoid of sexual interest. It presents, in quite remarkable detail, the life of a medieval closed male society which, one would have thought, could have little meaning for today’s permissive positivists. But it may well be that the sheer wealth of information has helped to make it popular. People read Arthur Hailey and James Michener to learn about the running of airports and power stations and to pick up, in fictional guise, some account of a national history. Read this book and you will never again have to wonder how an Italian monastery functioned in the fourteenth century.
As a somewhat elongated thriller it is far more teasing – and far far far better written – than anything by the late Dame Agatha Christie. Its nearest parallel in British detective fiction is Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night, which also presented crime in a closed society (a women’s college), had Latin quotations and a great parade of learning. But this work seems not to have had a large public in mind. It needs no stylistic erudition on the reader’s part, and titillates only intellectually.
I rejoice, and the rest of the literate world will rejoice with me, that bestsellerdom remains unsubmissive to cybernetic prognostics, and that a work of genuine literature can out trash. I heard a man say today on Italian television: ‘Al meglio non c’è mai fine.’ This seems to mean, among other things, that you can’t put barbed wire round the best. Best and bestseller are not mutually exclusive terms.
I probably do not need to recommend this book to British readers. The impetus of foreign success should ensure a large readership here. Even Ulster rednecks, to say nothing of mild Anglicans who detest Christianity cooking with garlic, will feel comforted by this image of a secure age when there was an answer to everything, when small, walled society could be self-sufficient, and the only pollution was diabolic. Patriots will be pleased to find such a society in need of British pragmatism.
Observer, 16 October 1983
Review of The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
(London: Secker and Warburg, 1983)