Just started
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco.
Part history, part philosophy, part murder mystery. The perfect combination
Loved that book, though it does take a while to hit its stride. Great read. The last third is brilliant, and builds superbly on what has gone before.
This was the very first book - the one that created the genre - with the idea of a medieval murder mystery.
However, it differed from all of its successors in that it used the device of a thriller, a murder mystery - to explore, discuss and debate questions of medieval society as well as church and state politics and philosophy, both Christian, and Aristotelian philosophy - very coherently and entirely logically - within the book's framework.
So, it used the framework of a thriller to explore medieval culture - the thriller and murder mystery was the narrative device, but the aim of the book was to really explore medieval culture from a different perspective using the format of a murder mystery.
Most of the successor books - the ones that were written subsequently by other writers mining this genre - are murder mysteries set in the medieval era, which is a very different thing.
Anyway, most unexpectedly, it worked perfectly well both as a challenging philosophical exploration of medieval society - and that of the Catholic Church - and as a gripping and a superbly told and exceptionally well plotted murder mystery.
And - much to the surprise of Umberto Eco - who was an Italian academic with a healthy appetite for the good things in life, and one who cultivated a playfully eclectic approach to learning and scholarship - it because a world wide bestseller.
Most of the books in this genre which followed (the Brother Cadfael stories, - which were excellent - among others, come to mind) told perfectly good murder mysteries - and understood the history (but not the philosophy) exceedingly well.
But The Name Of The Rose worked well on a number of levels.
Yes, there was.
Unusually, (to my mind), it was one of the few occasions that Hollywood didn't massacre a work that I had loved.
Now, the movie didn't handle (didn't even touch upon) the philosophical exploration of the mindset of the medieval world.
Nevertheless, I don't hold that against it; it was faithful to the backbone - the core narrative of the book, and, better still, was also sensitive to the sense of the time, and sought to capture and portray the ethos and flavour of the era. (Among other things, I used to teach European medieval history once upon a time, and so have some sense of this world).
Outside of a spaghetti western, (which I also love), I have rarely seen a more splendidly and gloriously ugly set of actors, and I welcomed this.
I don't think Americans realise that Europeans get really sick of the flawless dental work and perfect physique of many US actors and this is something that is not really terribly credible in a historical work.
Look at some of the contemporary portraits - stunning renditions of the human form and the human face - in the Renaissance section of some European art galleries if you want to get an idea of what people actually looked like then. Most of the portraits painted are not idealised, on the contrary, they are disturbingly and wonderfully realistic, yet respectful - after all, these were patrons being painted, who paid for the work, and so, wouldn't be traduced on the painted page, and that is apart from the self portraits - some of which were searing self examinations on the part of the artist of himself.
Besides, such unnatural physical perfection (as one finds with US actors) - especially when set in a medieval world where death by disease, - not least disfiguring disease - was not at all unusual - not only is unlikely but does not encourage that willing suspension of disbelief without which all theatre (and some movies) cannot be credible.
So, the movie was one of the first Hollywood adaptations that I didn't loathe; in fact, much to my surprise, I thought it extremely good. Sean Connery was - perhaps surprisingly - excellent as William of Baskerville.
