Baudolino by Umberto Eco

Book Review: Baudolino by Umberto Eco
Vintage, London 2003. ISBN 0099422395
First published on Birmingham Words

Those who struggled through the first one hundred pages of The Name of the Rose and then gave up, or who got lost in the thicket of esoterica that is Foucault’s Pendulum, could hardly be expected to rejoice at the arrival of a new novel from the Italian heavyweight novelist, Umberto Eco. However, Baudolino, the most recent of Eco’s four novels, is something of a departure: far from being a forbidding work, it is in fact one of the most entertaining books that I have read for months. A loose and rambling yarn, the book follows the fortunes of the peasant Baudolino – skilled in languages and the art of storytelling, which is to say in the art of lies – as he enters the court of Frederick the Great, travels to Paris to study, and eventually finds himself on a wild goose chase in search of the land of Prester John, the mythical Christian Priest-King of the Orient, carrying several faked relics of John the Baptist’s head and a similarly faked Holy Grail.

Umberto Eco moves through the world of his novel with an absolute assurance: he is, after all, a medievalist of considerable note who has written scholarly works on the thought of Aquinas. But rarely does he let his staggering learning become oppressive or showy, having the sense to subordinate this knowledge to the demands of the story itself. There are times when the pace lets up a little as Eco gets bogged down in the civic politics of medieval Italy, but who would not get bogged down in such matters? Even here it is clear that he is approaching his subject with a kind of relish, although perhaps it is a relish that can only be shared by those with Italian blood.

As Baudolino and his companions push their way ever further eastwards, the tale picks up speed, becoming increasingly fantastic. In the city of Pndapetzim we meet with many of the bizarre creatures and the ‘monstrous races’ of the medieval imagination – the skiapods who have only one foot which they use as a sunshade, for example, or the panotians who have ears so large that they can wrap themselves inside them like blankets to keep out the cold – all of whom distinguish themselves from each other not by the peculiarities of their physical form but by their theological differences. Eventually, after Pndapetzim is sacked by the White Huns, the travellers press on to the East in pursuit of their goal.

There is enormous pleasure to be had from this book. Although in many ways it is an indulgent and shambolic construction, a shaggy dog story that rambles here and there at will, it is driven by an exuberance of the imagination and sometimes the most startlingly beautiful writing. Particularly impressive is Eco’s description of the river Sambatyon, in which there flows stone, not water:

It was a maestic course of rocks and clods, flowing ceaselessly, and in that current of great shapeless masses could be discerned irregular slabs, sharp as blades, broad as tombstones, and between them, gravel, fossils, peaks, and crags. Moving at the same speed, as if driven by an impetuous wind, fragments of travertine rolled over and over, great faults sliding above, then, their impetus lessening, they bounced off streams of spall, while little chips now round, smoothed as if by water in their sliding between boulder and boulder, leaped up, falling back with sharp sounds, to be caught in those same eddies they themsevles had created, crashing and grinding…

Umberto Eco, like his character Baudolino, is a big fat liar. But, if a man can lie with such passion, forcefulness and enchantment that he can bring a river of flowing rock so vividly to life, then these are lies well worth listening to.