I heard this week that Umberto Eco had died at the age of 84. This was undoubtedly sad news; he was in a rare breed of 'intellectual' personalities who had made a sizeable impact on public life, and, I think for my generation, a personification of a type of italian refinement that had been easy to lose sight of in the face of a decade of mismanagement and depression. I was a huge fan of the wonderful, Conan-Doyle-celebrating, The Name of The Rose, and was just finishing Baudolino, which I had heard was a spiritual sequel of sorts.
The standard comment about Umberto Eco (typically based on the aforementioned The Name Of The Rose, a literary phenomenon) is that the books are great because they are 'hard', packed with references to historical and etymological trivia, and full of linguistic double play. I didn't get that with the Name Of The Rose, and in many sense glanced over the period detail to be swept along by the 'damn good thriller' plot and very slight twists on the classic Sherlock Holmes formula; and to be honest I remain a bit suspicious and incredulous when cultural commentators hold it up as truly 'literary' and urbane. I then tried his 2nd book Foucalt's Pendulum and got thoroughly and unpleasantly lost, without the familiarity of style or setting to help me along.
Baudolino saw me on happily firmer ground; it's to all intents and purposes a cousin to two of my favourite novels, Robert Graves I, Claudius and Count Belisarius, and like these forms a Secret History where our Procopius is the eponymous Baudolino, a court favourite and adviser of Emperor Frederick 'Barbarossa' in the early thirteenth century. Baudolino is a peasant's son, taken to court after a chance encounter with the Emperor, and as a result of his precocious gift for languages and inventive memory. The story centres on Baudolino's upbringing, and life lone fascination and search for Prester John.
[As a bit of background here; Prester John was a popular urban myth in the late middle ages, of a Christian king in the east, inhabiting a land of riches and wonder. The thought went that Christianity had been spread east by the apostle Thomas, and, if the west could find him, the resulting alliance could pincer movement the Muslims and reclaim the Holy Land. In the period of Baudolino he was thought to be in 'The Indies', and into the 15th century this conflated into Ethiopia, whose first emissaries to Europe were referred to as being from the land of Prester John]
For me this is a particularly fascinating period in history, and Eco skilfully weaves in real events as being brought about by Baudolino's wise counsel; effectively he's a consummate liar and politician, and has numerous witty pen-over-sword interventions as Frederick struggles to dominate the Italian Free Cities, including the founding of Eco's own home city Alessandria. We follow Baudolino from a callow youth, to an indulged and carousing student in Paris (where he assemble a memorable group of mismatched friends), and into a key adviser of the Emperor. His story is told as an old man, recounting his tale during the Latin conquest of Constantinople, and the story is predicated on this strange loop. Baudolino is a self-confessed master liar, telling a story about his life of telling stories, with no-one, not even himself, knowing what is true any more. The novel becomes progressively more fantastical; from using clever ruses to raise the siege of his home city, in a witty but well researched historical fiction, Baudolino then is ascribed to having fabricated the (real, false) 'Letter from Prester John' sent to the Byzantine Emperor telling tales of fantastical beasts and riches in a magical kingdom to the East. Baudolino then sets out on a voyage to find Prester John, supported by his student friends, and all of his hyperbole comes true; from having been immersed into the struggles of Frederick with an unruly Milan, we are suddenly fighting Manticores and crossing rivers of flowing stone on a journey to the east.
The book begins to take on the air of a dream sequence, as we explore the land of Prester John with Baudolino. Here he finds a nation of cripples - with a race of one-legged men, another of feminist hippies, another of bunny-eared humans, another of giants, all of whom live in harmony despite following various early Christian heresies. This section must be an allegory of some kind, but the religious subtleties were sufficiently beyond me that I just enjoyed the madness of it. In tow, Baudolino has the cowardly Armenian Ardrouzino, who earns his money faking relics, and the dastardly Zosimos, a Byzantine who practices 'necromancy' by various ingenious magic tricks. The plot delights in skipping in circles around this idea of lies becoming truth, tall tales becoming dogma, and belief being more important than reality, with a cast of self-deceiving and arbitrary courtiers.
Inevitably, there is a 'locked room' mystery embedded in the story, and a clever explanation at the end which rounds off the story, but in reality this is a classic entertaining picaresque; and just like (if not quite as good as) The Name of The Rose, Eco has created a book that, for all it's intricate weaving, is just really good fun.
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