Ok, We Are Talking About The Name of The Rose

By the author. I realize those aren’t roses, but they are near a museum in Taiwan and that kind of counts, considering how much the book is about storing and sharing information.

Are you a historical mystery fan, but you really want something high-falutin’? You know what I mean. Something that goes for meaning hard, the way a Louise Penny mystery does.

Have I got the book for you.

Do you want an endlessly detailed explanation of the Papal politics of the 1300’s and an equally endless debate on Christ’s position on laughter and intellectual curiosity?

Have I got a book for you.

Basics

Written in 1980 by a medievalist named Umberto Eco, and translated into English in 1983, ‘The Name of The Rose’ is told as the chronicle of an old monk remembering an event from his youth.

It is divided into seven days, and each day is divided into the canonical hours- matins, sext, nones, and vespers. I appreciated this set up as both a mood setter, an idea appropriate for a medieval monk, and as a way to break up a long work.

And it is almost 600 pages, friends.

Plot Summary

Other than the formatting, it resembles most of the historical mysteries you’ve read. William of Baskerville arrives at a fancy monastery completely dominated by its library. He’s on a mission to represent the emperor’s theologians at a meeting between warring church factions: the Minorites and the Franciscans. He has a novice named Adso with him, and it’s the novice’s recollections you are reading.

The abbot tells William that a monk named Adelmo has been found dead at the foot of the cliff and asks him to find out what happened to him before the factions show up for the meeting. He warns William off the library, though. William agrees and from there, the bodies start piling up. There’s a labyrinth, some secret codes that are broken, all the monks and servants act shady, and in the end, William finds out what happened to the dead guys.

Thoughts/ Comparisons

I can see why it was as well received as it was in literary circles. Eco was lucky in his translators, and his beautiful prose comes through. Also, it has that literary tendency to report surroundings in lush detail. He takes a page and a half to describe a lintel, for instance.

I want to place it against ‘St. Peter’s’ Fair,’ written by Peter Ellis in 1980. Peter Ellis embraces the feel of the cozy and is significantly shorter, even though the murder in ‘St. Peter’s Fair’ is fairly drenched in the monastic politics of the 1100’s and centers on tension between the town and the church. It lacks the gothic touches of a labyrinth and big church councils, and Ellis is just more hopeful, telling a small story about a monk uncovering a murder inspired by a girl who is carrying a secret letter. It’s a cheerful suggestion that we can survive in hard times, with our best monk Brother Cadfael illuminating the ways that normal people deal with folks in power.

With Eco, you can tell he has done some thinking on post-modernism (beyond being the author of ‘Foucault’s Pendulum.’) Characters talk about how one discovers truth, the meaning of truth, and its uses. There are plenty of themes and symbols being bandied about, with various characters acting out contrasting ways of desiring things to a destructive end, including the desire for knowledge.

Those things and papal vs. imperial politics are huge chunks of ‘The Name of the Rose.’ He does have a concise plot, unlike the magical realism of another work of his, ‘The Island of Tomorrow.’ However, you would cut the book in half by removing the conversations about philosophy. It would not be the same book, of course, but I assume the movie that was made of it removed a bunch of it.

So, I say that genre fiction can be deep and meaningful. I would argue that there were many themes and lessons in ‘St. Peter’s Fair.’ However, may I be so cynical as to suggest that, to wind up in the prestigious Everyman’s Library, your book has to be long, wear your themes on its sleeve, and dump all of the information you could ever want about 1300’s papal politics on your pages.

It is actually interesting to me how ‘The Name of the Rose’ has become a classic when it contains many of the tropes of a gothic novel that most historical mystery writers eschew- codes and secret passages were being poo-poohed as early as the Golden Age of detective fiction. That attitude to sensational effects always struck me as an attempt by the mystery genre to be more ‘intellectual’ and different from say, gothic horror.

Mind you, historical mysteries became popular as a subgenre in the 1970’s and really took off in in 1977 with Peter Ellis’s ‘A Morbid Taste of Bones,’ there was always a streak of sensationalism running through even Golden Age detective puzzle novels. I just find it interesting that the example in the Everyman’s Library should harken more back to Poe and ‘The Moonstone’ than the far less sensational Brother Cadfael stories that came out at the same time.

Miscellaneous Influences

To dwell on the social side of things seems beside the point: it was written by a left-leaning Italian in the 1980’s. It is not going to resemble the thinking of someone 45 years later on another continent. Just know that the one woman in the book doesn’t even get a name. She’s more likely to be a stand in for all the ‘simple’ people who are getting trampled between imperial and papal scheming.

I will say this: historical fiction is always riding a line between writing someone a modern reader would like and someone we would find historically accurate. This becomes doubly true for someone such as Eco, who studied the era for a living. He didn’t have to go digging too far in the 1300’s to find inspiration for conspiracies.

Oh, and I’m positive Eco read Doyle. There is so much Sherlock Holmes and Watson in William and Adso. The opening scene of the book is William deducing where a missing horse went, what he looks like, and his name from a trio of clues. It is an obvious way to introduce a smart character, but the way he does it carries serious Holmes vibes.

Conclusion

It was probably a mistake to read this when I had a cold. Still, it’s an interesting addition to the mystery genre.