In 1327, Sean Connery--I mean Brother William of Baskerville--arrives at a remote monastery in northern Italy ostensibly to facilitate a meeting between a delegation from Pope John XXII and the Franciscan Michael of Cesena, whose cause (monastic poverty) has the backing of the Holy Roman Emperor. The Church is on the brink of schism (yes, the Great Western one), as hostilities between the papacy and the Empire reach a boiling point, and the meeting's success is of critical importance. Tensions are high as William and his assistant, our narrator Adso, arrive, and not just because of the impending talks. A monk has died suspiciously and, fearing for the talks' success and his monastery's reputation, the abbot asks William to investigate. At first Adelmo's death appears to be a private matter, but then another monk is gruesomely murdered, and another and another, the manner of their deaths seeming to deliberately evoke the Book of Revelation. William, a follower of Roger Bacon, William of Ockham and Thomas Aquinas, applies cool Aristotelian logic to sort through the clues, which seem increasingly to point to the abbey's mysterious, labyrinthine, and closely-guarded library. What is the secret that it contains? Heresy, political intrigue, murder, or all three?
I had high hopes for this book. My doctorate is in the religious art (and history) of Renaissance Italy; I took multiple graduate and undergraduate courses in Medieval apocalyptic and Eucharistic art and theology; I studied and loved Latin to the point of embarrassment. Umberto Eco is a professor of semiotics, which I find interesting. In short, all signs pointed to me sitting up all night feverishly clutching this book in my grubby little paws (unwashed because showering would take time away from reading) completely enraptured.
What went wrong?
In a nutshell, this book is too smart for its own good. Though called a murder mystery, the mystery is incidental. The Name of the Rose is a philosophical meditation that just happens to contain a murder mystery and these two plotlines don't come together until the very end (and there only loosely). The result is that each distracts from the other. Eco's knowledge of Medieval history is dizzying, literally: the long excursuses on the various religious factions were hard to follow without constantly looking up names, dates, summaries, and definitions nor was their relevance always clear. When the mystery resumed, I'd often forgotten key events or characters (and vice versa). To navigate through these portions without sacrificing the pace of the novel requires a comparable fluency in the events surrounding the Investiture Controversy, the Avignon Papacy, the Dulcinian heresy, the Inquisition, and the debates about Apostolic poverty, etc., that I just don't have. The solution to this doesn't have to be removing the history or dumbing down its presentation. To guide her readers through the labyrinthine world of Tudor politics and its players in the Booker Prize winning Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel employs a deceptively simple solution: a dramatis personae. Had Eco inserted a few pages in the beginning, glossing the key characters, religious groups, and historical figures/events, I think the history would have complemented his storytelling rather than impeding it.
But perhaps we are meant to be impeded?
Umberto Eco is a declared proponent of the "open text," (reader response theory, which incidentally I also studied in college), which emphasizes the role of the reader in creating the meaning and experience of a text. The murder mystery, therefore, is not so much a story as a device, a metaphor for our experience of textual interpretation. The meaning of The Name of the Rose, therefore, is neither absolute nor transparently laid out; it is up to the reader to generate it. Such a challenge can be liberating and exciting, but here I felt overwhelmed. Whether it was the constant looking up of references or the flipping back to recall details, I felt like Eco was just asking too much of me and giving me very little in return. I am grateful that this was the opposite of the puffed up, reductive, and just plain wrong pseudo-"history" of that atrocity The Da Vinci Code. But there's a fine line between a book that feels like a challenge (Possession for example) and one that just feels like work. In an interview, Eco reportedly said that he made the first several hundred pages deliberately opaque to weed out "unworthy" readers. I hope that isn't true--by all means don't dumb down your content but don't deliberately alienate your audience either.
This may be a simple case of reality/expectation disconnect. I hope it is. When I first saw Gosford Park, I hated it. Reviews compared it to Agatha Christie, so I went in expecting a neat, tidy, cozy whodunit and was, of course, disappointed when it turned out to be social commentary/domestic drama couched in a murder mystery. Viewing it a second time without expecting it to be something different, I loved it. I bought the dvd and I watch it every time I get sick. I began The Name of the Rose expecting more of a page-turning historical mystery and that's just not what this book is. Perhaps, if I hadn't brought misinformed expectations to the table, I would have enjoyed it for what it was? When I read Ulysses in college, in that class on the open text, my professor described is a book that was meant not to be read but to be re-read. So that we might better understand and appreciate it, she had us read it out of order so that we were exploring a text rather than trying to follow a story.
Perhaps the same is true for The Name of the Rose? After all, there were many parts of the book that I liked (I'd probably give it 3 out of 5 stars). I wonder, now that I've got the "story," what would happen were I to go back and try again.
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