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Book Review: Baudolino
By Umberto Eco

A liar's tale from the Middle Ages
BAUDOLINO By Umberto Eco,
A Novel,Translated from the Italian  by William Weaver,
Harcourt: 522 pp., $27

Los Angeles Times By Iain Pears

Sunday,October 27 2002 - - Many years ago, when I was a jobbing reporter for a news agency in Rome, we received a circular from a publisher inviting one of our number to go to Bologna to interview a professor of semiotics who had written a novel. It was a quiet period, but there was little enthusiasm for taking up the offer, despite Bologna's reputation as the culinary capital of Italy. A semiotician writing a novel, it was generally concluded, would be a bit like Samuel Johnson's dog walking on two legs: It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all. In my case, a trip to Naples seemed more promising, and the job of interviewing the author went to a reporter who usually occupied himself with the stock market reports.

Big mistake. Professor Umberto Eco's book, "The Name of the Rose," went on to become a worldwide publishing phenomenon, selling millions of copies, more or less inventing the literary thriller, breathing new life into the much-maligned historical novel and convincing readers and publishers alike that even immensely abstruse and complex ideas were not necessarily an instant sentence of death for a work of fiction.

Revisiting the book two decades later, I find it is still a marvel. It's not without its faults, of course, but Eco somehow manages to pull off the alchemist's trick and transform what would have been glaring and possibly fatal flaws in any other book into major strengths. Certainly, he would be hammered in any creative writing course for the way he allows the narrative to stop dead for pages while he examines some obscure point of medieval theology of only tangential relevance, or inserts a conversation about classical philosophy (as understood in the 14th century), or lards the prose with Latin tags for which he declines to give any translation. The mastery lies in the fact that none of this matters; it even contributes greatly to the book's appeal: Readers become swept up in Eco's almost boyish enthusiasms, and they are prepared to indulge him his little ways because he is so clearly enjoying himself.

In the novels that followed, however, the faults stayed as faults: "Foucault's Pendulum," in particular, is an unwieldy beast, lacking the joie de vivre of "The Name of the Rose," with a style that tips over into the self-indulgent. The ideas and the story never mesh particularly well, and reading it is something of a chore. In his latest novel, however, Eco has fortunately recovered his sense of fun, and "Baudolino" manifests many of the exuberant extravagances that made "The Name of the Rose" so hugely enjoyable.

The novel is the story of Baudolino, an Italian of poor origin who is adopted by Frederick Barbarossa, the 12th century Holy Roman emperor. The tale is his life story as told to Niketas, a Byzantine nobleman whom Baudolino saves during the sack of Constantinople by forces from the West in 1204. He tells of wonderful things, in particular how he became a liar and discovered that the lies he told became true or better than true. Frederick needs a little bit of help to raise his prestige, so Baudolino discovers the corpses of the three Magi for him. He knows they are not the three Magi, but no matter: They become the bodies of the three Eastern kings in the Bible.

He goes to study in Paris, and he dreams with friends of Prester John, the legendary Christian king from the Far East, near the earthly paradise at the very edge of the world. He writes a letter from Prester John to Frederick, and the letter takes on a life of its own, almost bringing the kingdom into existence, so convincingly that Baudolino and friends set off to discover it. Other metamorphoses follow, for example, Baudolino's father's drinking cup, hewn from a root, becomes the Holy Grail. It takes on magical powers because Baudolino thinks the cup Christ drank from should be as simple as his father's, rather than something richly decorated with gold and jewels.

The book is a liar's tale, another contribution to the fibbers' chronicles that were probably already well-established as a genre when "The Odyssey" appeared and that have carried on more or less without a break to the memoirs of politicians today. Had it been done straight, the book could have become tedious, but throughout, Eco twists the braggart's narrative because not only is Baudolino a liar, he also knows he is a liar.

It consequently becomes a very Eco-ish game in that we are reading a fiction about a fiction that often contains yet more levels of fiction. We know we are meant to disbelieve the narrative somewhere, but there is always the slight discomfort of trying to work out where, exactly, our incredulity is meant to settle. Thus, when Baudolino has a discussion with a Greek monk about strange animals called methagallinarii, are these something that Eco has invented? Or the monk? Or Baudolino in reporting the conversation? Were they creatures that were considered credible in the Middle Ages? Eco is having one of his jokes with the reader, but only a true expert on medieval myth and iconography would know what, exactly, the joke is.

Consequently, the author is engaged in a continuous subversion not only of the forms of the historical novel -- which depends on a sort of contract between author and reader that disbelief will be suspended for the duration even when the period being described is well-known -- but also of our engagement with any sort of narrative at all. In so doing, of course, he is making a point about the nature of belief itself and giving an insight into the medieval mind, which had no effective theoretical or practical means of checking information to see whether it should be credited or not. It is quite a disorienting experience and very effectively done.

The strangeness reaches its climax when Baudolino and his motley band of associates head east to find Prester John, and the travels slowly turn into an imitation of the medieval tales of exploration, full of strange beasts and people, miraculous happenings and dangers. Once more, we are not sure whether Baudolino believes what he is telling us, not least because the narrative keeps switching from first person (which we can safely distrust, most of the time) to third person (which in fiction we are usually supposed to believe). They cross the Sambatyon, a river of stone; meet the giants and pygmies, one-legged skiapods, the blemmyae who have no heads or necks, the panotians who learn to fly using their gigantic ears. Despite their grotesque appearance, the creatures can tell one another apart only by their different understandings of the Incarnation and the Holy Trinity. They are captured by cynocephali and escape by flying away on the legs of rocs; Baudolino briefly changes from sinner to stylite before trying once more to find the legendary kingdom. At other stages, we have discussions on the vacuum, the nature of the universe and whether it resembles the ark of the covenant, and we form a nodding acquaintance with Dionysius' ear, Archimedes' mirror and a dozen or so examples of John the Baptist's head.

The one criticism with the book is that the language is not always as sure as it might be, and while Eco is an expert at engaging the attention for an account of hashish and the Assassins, even he has to struggle to make the politics of the Holy Roman Empire as it deals with the city-states of northern Italy seem fascinating. Some of these passages are either too long or too short, as they give immensely complex detail without ever managing to make it gripping or memorable. Equally, the style of English is often strangely wooden, especially in the dialogue, although it is difficult to tell whether this fault lies with the writing or with the translation.

There is a vast amount of information and entertainment here and, in the end, the reader capitulates to Eco's demands and wallows in it as someone in the Middle Ages would have done: with all the critical faculties shut down, simply relishing a good yarn.

Iain Pears is the author of, most recently, "The Dream of Scipio."

A liar's tale from the Middle Ages
www.calendarlive.com/books/bookreview/cl-bk pears27oct27,0,6078862.story?coll=cl%2Dbookreview

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