Too mediaeval by half
Thomas Wright
BAUDOLINO by Umberto Eco
Secker, £18, pp_ 522. ISBN 0436276038
Ihave read with great pleasure every work of non-fiction that Umberto Eco has published over the last decade. His journalism is brilliant, his philosophical writings are eminently sane and commonsensical, and he is that rare thing. a literary theorist who knows what literature is and who can write about it accessibly. However, like many people I know, I gave up reading his fiction about 100 pages into Foucault's Pendulum, an unbearably ponderous and unwieldy novel that lacked the intellectual excitement and the narrative drive of The Name of the Rose. In reading Baudolino, I was very curious to see if I had been missing out.
The eponymous hero of the novel tells the story of his life to a Greek historian during the sack of Constantinople by Crusaders in 1204. 'Born among cows', in a small town that would become the city of Alessandria, Baudolino is blessed with two gifts: the ability to master any language and a capacity for inventing fabulous tales. A likeable and cheeky trickster in the mould of Boccaccio's Chichibio, he becomes the adopted son, adviser and licensed fool of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. Baudolino's narrative concerns his part in Barbarossa's rise and downfall, and an imperial mission, which he leads, to return the Holy Grail to the mythical priest king of the East, Prester John, The bulk of this 500-page novel deals with the preparation for the mission and the cultures, characters, marvels and monsters that Baudolino and co. meet on the way.
Eco is good at evoking life in mediaeval Italy and at recreating the intellectual horizon of the period. The descriptions of the internal rivalries between Italian cities are fascinating and strikingly relevant to today (some northern communes form a league against the others); the same could be said of the vivid sketches of the distinctive character of their inhabitants. There is a running joke about the meanness of the Genoese, and the people of Alessandria, Eco's native city, are lovingly depicted as vulgar, hardheaded and down-to-earth. As a 'mediaeval world picture' the novel is also successful: in its making, Eco has obvi
ously plundered countless mediaeval books on theology, history, geography and literature.
It is this bookishness that gives the novel its mediaeval atmosphere: like Chaucer, Eco has ransacked an entire library to produce a single book. That ambiance is also created by the continual introduction of the kind of disputations that were taught in universities in the middle ages. 'Does the vacuum exist?' How does a new city achieve legal status?' and 'Why would God have created us, only to expose us to the risk of damnation?' are just a few of the many philosophical and legal questions debated.
The style gives the hook an air of historical authenticity: it often reads like a dialogue between a group of rather pedantic scholastic theologians. As well as this, it allows Eco to display his vast knowledge and to include every single scrap of his research. Unfortunately, it also makes the book extremely heavy going: it is more of a succession of randomly arranged rhetorical set pieces than a novel with a story. While the debates and intellectual digressions in The Name of the Rose were an essential part of the narrative (they were usually either clues to the murder or false trails), here they aren't successfully dramatised within the plot. The characters, too, are merely mouthpieces for ideas; if the novel is ever made into a film it will take a whole cast of Roberto Benign is to breathe any life into them.
Baudolino is the literary equivalent of bad conceptual art. The ideas behind it are interesting enough, but the actual experience of reading it is dull. There is a fascinating on-going debate about the role that art and literature play in the way we classify sense data. On their journey, Baudolino and his companions recognise and categorise things according to the stories they have read. There is also an intriguing discussion of the status of scientific facts: even if objective facts were a possibility we would, it is suggested, still need a theory or a story to make sense of them. This is why poets, and fabulists such as Baud°lino, are still the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
These, and other ideas such as the influ
ence of crazy theories on history, are exciting in themselves; they don't make a good novel though, if they aren't embodied in interesting characters and a compelling plot. Eco has in fact explored them with far more wit and verve in recent non-fictional books such as Serendipities and Kant and the Platypus. In these works Eco proves that he can still out-think most people; on the evidence of this novel, however, he has lost the gift of thinking in stories.
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