The Name of the Rose

Trigger warnings: Rape, homophobia, misogyny, sexual coercion, descriptions of torture, mutilation, executions by burning, infanticide

This was a very solid 3.5 stars for me, no higher and no lower. This book bamboozled me for the most part, so steeped in medieval Catholic theology as it was, but the mystery aspect of it was compelling and thrilling when it did shine through. It was a dense and sometimes difficult read and not one I would easily recommend to just about anyone. I only have extremely superficial knowledge of theology and almost none whatsoever of the religious politics of Europe in this time period, so a lot of the long, long debates and discussions in this book went straight over my head, but at least the mystery aspect kept me going.

The story is ostensibly told as if it had been a lost manuscript discovered some time during WW2, written by the monk Adso of Melk in 14th century Italy during his declining years. He writes of a time when he was a novice, probably around 14-16 years old, and under the mentorship of William of Baskerville. Together, they arrive at an abbey in Northern Italy where the abbot requests William to once again don the hat of an inquisitor and investigate the mysterious death of one of his young monks, Adelmo, who had apparently fallen to his death from a window. A series of deaths in the abbey follows.

I really don't know enough about the politics and theology of the time to comment much about the broader plot point of the book with all the different Catholic factions at each other's throat and yelling at each other that the other camp(s) were heretics and harboured the Antichrist. All that really struck me was that in this endless conflict, there is a ton of brutality of human against human, and so so often it's the innocent and the simple who are caught in the crossfire and made to pay the price despite having literally done nothing except being manipulated without knowing better. Deaths may have happened in this book, but none of them were near as violent as what was described in this book, of the deaths, torture, and executions that happened elsewhere.

Another thing that really bothered me was the incredible misogyny and treatment of women here. Perhaps Eco was going for a period-accurate mindset here, where women are mostly treated as “vessels of the Devil” simply because they present temptations to men (of course men are blameless /s). If they aren't diabolical vessels, then a woman must be an actual saint. There is no in-between. Period-accurate though it might be, it was just really really really annoying and discomfiting to read when it presented itself. The only little redeeming factor, which wasn't nearly enough to redeem the whole, was when Adso did call out the injustice that the village girl was condemned to death for what was clearly the fault and machinations of Salvatore and Remigio, but all he could do was really just cry himself to sleep and then forget about it. Even William couldn't do or say anything because that misogyny and injustice is just so deeply entrenched in their society that speaking out against it publicly would only have meant their own deaths in similar ways rather than changing anything or saving anyone.

On a lighter note, I was surprised by how much this book paralleled Sherlock Holmes and I don't believe it was a coincidence. It's kind of a random thing for Eco to add in to this book but I'm glad that it was there - if the mystery had been any less thrilling, I'm not sure if I could've waded through all the denseness of the theology in it.

The ending was a little surprising to me and I did enjoy the analysis of it: When William calls out the fact that he (and probably us as readers too) was so easily misled by the seductive theory of an orderly method to the killings, that it was just one murderer behind everything and someone who had premeditated it to coincide with the trumpets of the Apocalypse. It all fit a very nice pattern which was turned on its head in the end. ”I should have known well that there is no order in the universe.” A very nice and apt conclusion for mystery readers who are used to expecting neat and orderly solutions to these things.