A review by runningdowndelaney
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

challenging dark mysterious slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.75

 
Now this is an old favourite. Eco's The Name of The Rose follows our narrator, Novice Adso of Melk, as he attends an Italian Abbey in the company of William of Baskerville. This Abbey, chosen for its remote locale, is the scene of a religious disputation between Pope John XII and the Franciscian order. It's a time of delicate negotiation -- which is complicated by the fact that one of the abbey monks has died in unusual circumstances. The abbot, having heard of William's tact and brilliance in investigation, tasks him to unravel the initial mystery. Over the next seven days, matters reach a fever pitch, with bodies piling up, the ghost of the Inquisition manifesting in the abbey, and the disputation deciding the potential fate of the Franciscan order itself. No pressure.

This is a book, when I first read it, that was a bit of a headache. There's multiple threads that collide into one another, and indeed whole sections of the book that seem to have no bearing on the matter at hand. Adso is lurid in his descriptions of many parts of the abbey, be it the structure, his brothers within the walls, or the rich religious imagery of the abbey. For some readers, it is positively off putting (I had to put the book down and go for a walk after a particularly heavy passage describing an incensed dream from Adso.) But it all contributes to an idea of wrongness. The Francisians of the time are banned from owning any personal property - yet William and his brothers are at an abbey weighed down with relics and other riches -- something lost on the abbot, who spends a few pages discussing the joys and uses of gemstones. Rereading it (and, I admit, with some extra notes on certain religious mentions such as Prester John or the Dulcinians), you get the sense of absolute hypocrisy. There is a library, a source of knowledge, which is forbidden to most of the order. Monks, seeming paragons of religious understanding, trade petty insults and actively spread malicious rumour on one another. The Inquisition is a shadow that hangs across the book, that further builds in the hypocrisy through William and Bernard Gui. William left the Inquisition as he found he was struggling with morality, whereas Gui continued in his role. The inquisitor is a terrifying presence, and despite the length of the text around it, it is a compelling read.

As time goes on, we step away from the purple prose, and focus more on the mysteries of the abbey. William is a compelling character to follow as he puzzles out the murders happening around him, combining his innate knack for people and a seemingly storied background; the comparisons to Holmes and DuPont abound. Adso for his part also has his own agency, albeit sometimes in shadow to William. The wider cast, especially the named characters, are also intriguing in their own rights. Many of the named characters you can track in the historical record, and at most are moved a few miles from where we would think they were at the time. There ius a general sense of going downwards, as if the reader is racing towards an inevitable crash at the end. A lot happens over the course of seven days, and there is very little success to show from it --
many monks die, the disputation fails as a result of said murders, the Iniquistion arrests members of a questionable sect of monk to torture to death, and eventually the grand plan is revealed and the abbey ends up destroyed.
Even the unveiling of the hand steering the chaos of the abbey is a multilayered exercise, involving solving the configuration of the library and passing through riddles and analogies to other religious texts. 

 I really can recommend this book, but recognise some of the writing is dense -- rather than pushing away from it, throwing oneself into the minituiae of the text brings with it a much richer understanding, not just of the book, but of the wider religious situation within the 14th century. As Eco talks about in notes in the background of this book -- the world is already there, as are many characters as discussed above. It's also a clever murder mystery, and includes many smaller mediations from the characters.





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