I have heard of this book for some time. When Mr Brown's The da Vinci Code came out, most of the reviewers compared him with Umberto Eco's later novel, Foucault's Pendulum. I however chose to read this book first.
As I've mentioned earlier, I was in luck to find a secondhand book with this title. What surprised me at first was the fact that the book was actually written in Italian. William Weaver took great pains to translate it into English, and I must say that he did a very good job at it, considering nobody has tried to re-translate it after all these years.
I was, at first, appalled by the voluminous descriptions found within the book. At times, the narrator seems to abandon the whodunit yarn and debate about the human logic, money and the Church, different orders of monkshood, and the uncertainties created by Christians themselves. For example, the debate between William and the elderly, blind Benedictine monk, Jorge, was about whether Christ ever laughed during his lifetime. Both sides had so much evidence to prove and disprove the question that I had to decide for myself whose side shall I root for. Then, sneaky as a black cat, the narrative would smoothly swing back to the detective yarn again.
William of Baskerville is a Franciscan monk with a novice traveling along. (Ring any bells?) He's invited by a Benedictine order to their monastery for a discussion on religious matters. However, their arrival is marred by a death that seemed to defy any explanation except for demonic possession. As the monastery is thrown further into chaos by further murders, William finally arrives at the solution by going into the labyrinthine library that seems to open its arms to everyone, but lets out only dead monks.
Like any good whodunit, the story itself was flawless, an Agatha Christie, and I'm not going to spill more of the beans. But there is more to this book than 'just a whodunit'. For within, I found out that the medieval monks were actually the first scholars, regarded higher than the lords whose lands they live upon. Monasteries also function as universities and libraries, where both the works of the 'heretics' and the Christians were collected, studied and cared for. Countless other historical facts, like a painting of Christ hanging on the cross with a hand pointing to a purse, was shocking. It's something that I would never learn from other books. This goes to show what anybody would do to 'legalise' their actions, and it mirrors what I see everyday in the newspapers.
Be prepared to spend a long time with this book, preferably on a long weekend.
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