books

Few novels have managed to smuggle a doctoral seminar past a mass readership the way this one did. On its surface it offers the most reassuring of premises: a clever detective, a sequence of corpses, a sealed setting from which the killer cannot escape. William of Baskerville and his young novice Adso arrive at a wealthy northern Italian abbey in 1327, ostensibly to broker a theological dispute between papal and imperial factions, and find themselves instead unravelling a string of deaths centred on the monastery's fabled, labyrinthine library. The name alone tells you what you are getting: a Franciscan Sherlock Holmes, deerstalker swapped for a habit. And yet anyone who picks the book up expecting an erudite cousin of the airport thriller will be sharply corrected within fifty pages.

The truth is that the mystery is a lure, and a slightly cynical one. What Eco actually wanted to write was a meditation on signs, faith, heresy, and the dangerous power of books, and he chose the murder plot as the spoonful of sugar. That candour is part of the novel's charm and also its central frustration. The investigation drifts in and out of focus, repeatedly stalling so that a character can deliver pages on apostolic poverty, the politics of competing religious orders, or the vexed question of whether Christ ever laughed. These digressions are frequently magnificent, but they do weigh the narrative down, heaping reference upon reference before remembering to return to the corpses. There were stretches where I suspected the book existed chiefly so its author could demonstrate the breadth of what he knew, and the suspicion is hard to fully shake.

Then there is the famous opening. Eco notoriously refused to abbreviate the first hundred pages, insisting that a reader who wished to live in the abbey for seven days must first accept the abbey's pace, and that those who could not should remain at the foot of the mountain. It is a bracing artistic position and an genuinely irritating one. The early chapters are dense with obscure factional politics and a crowd of similarly named monks, and getting a foothold takes real patience. The reward, when it comes, is considerable: the world thickens, the rhythms settle, and what felt like a slog reveals itself as deliberate immersion. But it is worth being honest that a good number of readers never reach that turn, and the book does little to coax them.

The untranslated Latin is the other recurring obstacle, and here my sympathies are divided. There is an undeniable whiff of showmanship to it, a sense of being told how clever the author is and how much catching up one has to do. When whole passages sit outside comprehension, the effect can alienate rather than enchant, and the device occasionally feels like padding dressed as erudition. And yet it is also thematically earned. This is a novel obsessed with the idea that meaning is gatekept, that knowledge is hoarded and weaponised, and the reader's own exclusion from the Latin enacts precisely that argument. Whether one finds this profound or merely pretentious will depend largely on temperament and on how near a good set of footnotes happens to be.

What carries the whole edifice is the writing itself, which is consistently, almost intimidatingly assured. Eco's recreation of medieval monastic life is the book's great triumph: the daily offices, the scriptorium, the politics of the cloister, all rendered with a density that makes the period feel inhabited rather than reconstructed. The metafictional framing, in which Eco presents himself merely as the latest translator of a manuscript handed down across centuries, is more than a clever trick. It deepens the book's preoccupation with how texts survive, decay, and accrue meaning, and for many readers it is this layer, rather than the whodunit, that lifts the novel from enjoyable to remarkable. William and Adso are warmly drawn, though the sheer crowd of supporting monks means few of the others register as people rather than positions.

It would be dishonest to call this an easy or an even book. It is patchy, self-indulgent, and structurally lopsided, a theological treatise that keeps having to remind itself there are murders to solve. But it is also rich, witty, and genuinely unlike anything around it, a book that rewards the open-minded reader in direct proportion to the effort demanded. Treat it as a chore and it will oblige you. Approach it as the strange, thorny, intricate thing it is, and it becomes one of the most singular reading experiences the form has to offer.