Umberto Eco: Baudolino

By PAT BASKETT

Clever is a problematic word. Its connotations are either derogatory - of being too smart for one's own good - or adulatory. Eco is a clever writer, in both senses of the word.

In this novel we're back in much the same period as The Name of the Rose.

Baudolino, an uneducated peasant at the end of the 12th century, has stolen an important parchment and scraped off most of what was written on it to write his own history. "Jesu," he says, "writing is hard work. All my fingers ake allready."

Baudolino's story begins in Italy and moves to the Third and Fourth Crusades and the fall of Constantinople, recounted mostly in retrospect, in the manner of the medieval French Chansons de Gestes (gestes meaning exploits).

His listener is a Byzantine historian who assures the unconfident Baudolino that there are no stories without meaning and that he (the historian) can find one even where others fail to see it.

The reader is thus well set up in these first few pages for the following 500. How, in this post-modern age, could Eco, one of the era's gurus, write in any other way? Writing about writing, about history as a palimpsest.

The cast is a phantasmagoria of exotic creatures and people but among them are several familiars.

They include the red-bearded Frederick Barbarossa (1152-90) who was Holy Roman Emperor and did terrible carnage in north Italy, enabling Eco to condemn war in terms that ring remarkably true for today. "That building is too beautiful to leave standing," he has one combatant say.

Barbarossa drowned in a river and Eco casts interesting aspersions on that.

Saladin was a Muslim to admire. Chivalrous and humane, he was no fanatic, although he did rout the Christians from Jerusalem in 1187. Here, he is a kind of go-between in a difficult position. (The Muslim/Christian dichotomy is not a major theme.)

On this arduous journey, Baudolino et al are involved in hilarious encounters with people peddling false relics, among them the bodies of the three Magi and the head of John the Baptist.

Eco presents the most far-fetched episodes in prose that is deadpan. It could have been a rollicking, bawdy tale a la Peter Carey (Illywhacker) or Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children) but it isn't.

The plot is a writer's conceit, the characters no more than two-dimensional vehicles for Eco's witty ideas and dialogue. We admire the complex political scenarios but fail to be drawn into them. For me the book's moments of brilliance were outweighed by long passages of tedium. Eco is too clever.

Stories where imagined geographies and histories serve as parables are something of a genre in contemporary Italian literature but it has more successful exponents than Eco - Italo Calvino and Dino Buzzati are two.

* Secker and Warburg $54.95