The fit is upon me to start another series. Like most of my blog series, it will probably be short-lived, unnoticed, and rather undeveloped. (But, then again, so are most human beings. Perhaps that is just how life is supposed to be this side of glory.)
That series is the “Book of the Month” feature, highlighting my favorite work from the preceding month with a short synopsis, review, and impression. The inaugural subject of this series is The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (1980), translated by one William Weaver.
This novel is rather like what would happen if the Middle Ages bumped into Sherlock Holmes and they both had a conversation about semiotics. That’s the study of signs and symbols and how we human beings know what they mean, for you normal folk. A young German monk (our narrator) winds up accompanying a British monk (William of Baskerville, in a deliberate nod to Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles) on a diplomatic mission in northern Italy in 1328.
It is a tense, fractured period. The Pope has abandoned Rome in what will become known to historians as the “Babylonian Captivity of the Church.” A significant portion of the Franciscan order is resisting the current (very rich, very corrupt) Pope John XXII over the issue of whether poverty is a mandatory virtue of the Church or not, and the Holy Roman Emperor has gotten involved in the politics of it all. Various popular heresies have ripped through the church. It is, for fans of medieval political writing, the time of Marsilius of Padua and William of Ockham. In the midst of all this drama (which intersects the story in various ways), William and his pupil Adso spend a week at a fabulously old, wealthy monastery—and are asked to solve a mysterious death. In doing so, they discover many secrets about the monastery and its inhabitants, including its wondrous (and forbidden) library.
The amount of research and thought that went into this novel was little short of astounding. I am not an expert on fourteenth-century history and writing—far from it—but everything I did know about the period and the books described dovetailed neatly. Eco even manages to copy the style of much medieval writing, full of allegory and description. While some places might have benefitted from an editor’s trimming (particularly late in the novel when momentum has been building) the effect is still one of stepping into a different time and place. With a few brief exceptions, this is not a modern story in historical trappings; it is instead a thoroughly medieval work with a few modern touches (or slips). The days and hours themselves are noted by the prayers of the monks, and the introduction gives a fictional textual history that seems quite plausible. To the casual reader, this is boring overkill; to someone like me who knows style and time, it is positively pleasurable.
While a couple (brief) atmosphere slip-ups keep this novel from cracking my top five list, it is definitely in the top twenty-five, and is slated for a leisurely reread. If you’re a fan of the Middle Ages, high-school-aged or more, a devourer of mystery novels, or a student of semiotics (or somehow all of the above) find it and enjoy it.
