1980 historical mystery. In 1327, Friar William of Baskerville and his
novice Adso of Melk try to solve a series of murders at a monastery in
northern Italy.
There's a phenomenon I often meet with books and other media
which have a reputation for being "difficult": hard-core fans claim to
love them, but they have great trouble explaining why they love them
or expounding on any of the themes beyond the basics. I think that
part of it at least is a desire to be seen as one of the smart guys
who understand rather than the stupid guys who don't.
With that in mind I'm not going to claim to have understood this book,
but I think one could make a pretty good case that there is, at the
core and by design, nothing to be understood. Even a tale told by a
very clever man can be sound and fury if he wants it to be.
If you're going to do a post-modern deconstruction of the detective
story in which not only does the protagonist not work out the solution
but the very idea of solving mysteries is called into question, that's
fair enough: your essential point is that there is no finality, no
certainty, no real meaning to anything. But spending over 180,000
words to say, in the end, "this entire exercise has been pointless and
the time you spent reading it has been wasted" rubs me wrong. Even the
title is deliberately as lacking in significance as could be arranged.
The writing is wilfully obscurantist, with diversions into
untranslated Latin and occasionally German, and long digressions on
Aristotelian philosophy and various millennial heresies. Maybe it's
because I'd just finished the entirely straightforward Skeleton
Hill, which contained several side notes that did come back to the
main plot in the end, but I found myself thinking of this material as
pure padding; there's certainly an awful lot of it, and the reader has
no way of prioritising it into what might be important in the rest of
the story and what's colour that can be enjoyed but need not be held
in the mind. Yes, yes, there's the dual papacy and the Church's
internal fight over apostolic poverty, but these aren't new and
strange ideas to me; this period is one in which I've spent a certain
amount of mental time already, and so my reaction, rather than "gosh
what an amazing revelation" as apparently intended, is "ho hum, that
again". Homosexuality is no longer as remarkable or shocking a thing
to put in a book as it was in Italy in the late 1970s. And… you're
telling me blind Jorge de Burgos is a nod to blind Jorge Luis Borges?
Oh, wow, man. Deep. To be fair, the obsession of the mediæval
churchman with God and sin is well-handled: everything is evaluated in
terms of how it will affect one's immortal soul.
Of course, as a story set in a monastery you don't expect a lot of
female characters, but having the one female character here not only
discussed solely in terms of how the narrator feels about her but also
quite literally nameless seems more offensive than simply not
including any women at all would have been.
Symbols about symbols about symbols.
This was a choice for the
YSDC Book Club.
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