Eco is a curious writer. One whose work as a semiotician attracted a whole generation of philosophy students and the admiration of many of Europe’s most prestigious intellectuals, but also one whose fame is based on a rip roaring medieval detective story. It’s many years since I read Name of the Rose, and in spite of labouring somewhat through Baudolino, I hope to return to it one of these days. Baudolino, tells the tale of the eponymous protagonist, who is adopted by Frederick Barbarossa, gets involved in all kinds of scrapes and battles with the emperor, before setting off on a hapless mission to find the kingdom of Prester John, the lost Christian prophet who reportedly ended up in the Indies. The novel is divided into two parts, written through forty chapters. The first deals largely with the Middle Ages politics of central and Eastern Europe. The second, a section that is more magical allegory, deals with Baudolino’s mission to the East in search of the lost prophet, and includes centaurs and cyclops other mythical creatures. There’s the sense of a writer straining to locate the precise register to tell what might have been a fascinating story, had that register been nailed down. Eco’s interest in pre-Renaissance Europe, aka the dark ages, is attractive. What were the people of that warlike continent like? Why is their history less well known than that of the Roman Empire? To what extent were the innumerable international conflicts a reflection of what we would now describe as globalisation? Where did our received idea of Europe end and the myths begin? These and other questions are latent in the text, but it never feels as though the writer quite gets to grips with them. As such, Baudolino is a lengthy curiosity, which lacks the narrative coherence of Name of the Rose.
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