When a rose is a maze

Press, 10 December 1983, Page 22

When a rose is a maze

The Name of the Rose. By Umberto Eco. Translated from the Italian by William Weaver. Seeker and Warburg, 1983. 562 pp. $26. (Reviewed by Ken Strongman) “The Name of the Rose” is a European best-seller. It has won Italy’s two highest literary prizes and a French award for the best foreign work. Umberto Eco is an historian, philosopher, aesthetician, and an expert on semiotics. So the book arrived with the hint of a reputation, something which creates very mixed feelings in a reviewer, or at least in this one. In one sense, “The Name of the Rose” is a classic detective story, even though it is told in reminiscence by Adso, a fourteenth-century monk. At the time the tale is set, Adso is a novice, and appears to be an ingenuous monk-like mixture of Sancho Panza and Dr Watson to his mentor, Brother William of Bakerville (nudge, nudge). Brother William’s ratiocination is brilliant, as indeed it has to be in order that he find his way through an amazingly complex monasterial labyrinth. The book is arranged through the seven days and nights that William and Adso spend in an Italian abbey which contains an unlikely collection of monks from all over Europe, most of whom seem to have committed heresy, if that is what one does with heresy. Murders occur, each more bizarre and macabre than the last. As William brings his intellect to bear on their solution, so it becomes increasingly obvious that the mystery of the abbey centres on the library, which contains a vast collection of learned tomes and which is built as a maze, but one with no centre. To pick his way through this, William needs all the scientific guile of Roger Bacon which, in 1327, was just beginning to make its impact. So, “The Name of the Rose” is in itself a maze of murder, secret writing, codes, locked rooms, mirrors, poisons, and psychedelic herbs, partly built with the horrors of the inquisition,

torture and death by burning. At another level entirely, Eco’s first novel is much more profound than the solving of a mystery. It is a serious work in which the whole world is seen as a book, or the whole world is seen in the microcosm of the monastery. Or the world is a maze within a maze. All of which takes a bit of working out and, as both the author and his two heroes eventually realise, theology and philosophy do not provide any easy answers either. Meanwhile, on the upbeat, Eco manages to persuade us to -listen to a running discourse of Aristotle on laughter and even more intricately, mimesis. In fact, there is a sense in which the plot hinges on this, which again, at the mention of mimesis makes one wonder about the extent to which the book is recursive. Is it nature mimicking art mimicking art mimicking nature? “The Name of the Rose” is written with the sort of complex elegance that one might expect from a polymath who has turned to fiction. Also, apart from one or two minor slips, the translation appears to do it justice, as does the stylish layout. However, and not altogether surprisingly for an Italian author, the vocabulary he draws on is very much Greco-Latin based, rather than of Anglo-Saxon origins. It pays to have a dictionary handy. How would you be with: hypotyposis, enthymeme, antistrophe, anagege, thurible and quodlibetical. I will bet 1000 lira that not one of these words has ever before appeared in a work of detective fiction. Finally, does “The Name of the Rose” deserve its prizes? Probably. It is a finely written and beautifully contrived book. It is not a light read and occasionally lapses into the academic, even the pedagogic. However, although erudite, it is entertaining, and although it tells a cunning story, it has a serious, although not entirely novel, message. To do it justice one has to put in some work, but it is worth it. It nearly always is.