It has been hailed as a wonderful piece of fiction which employs philosophy, theology and logic in the building up of its narrative. As I started the first pages, I was reminded of Mann’s Magic Mountain and Cervantes’s Don Quixote. As the author remarks in his post script the reader who doesn’t contemplate the first hundred pages seriously will have to remain at the foot of the hill. The action starts as William of Baskerville arrives to do the job of inquisitor. He is accompanied by Adso the narrator who is no less an intelligent inquisitor himself and an accomplice in all the machinations of William, although his avowed duty is to faithfully record the happenings.
The first monk to be killed is Adelmo and William deciphers it to be a suicide. A series of killings follow; Severinus. Berengar, Venantius, Malachi, Abo and Jorge all are killed, in one mysterious circumstance or the other. The mystery is cracked after the death of Malachi. There is a hint of apocalyptic fate as the deaths point to an extraordinary chain of events which could be earthly as well as celestial. There is terror everywhere as everyone is kept guessing.
Amidst all this chaos, William remains steadfast to his task, stiff and ironic, dedicated to the unraveling of the truth. Unlike Bernard Gui, who pontificates about good and bad and about stifling heresy, William is not judgmental. His thirst is for knowledge and enlightenment, vision which has to correspond to the rigours of logic, reason and truth which is the most important of them all and which is most important in itself.
The scandalous tome is Aristotle’s Poetics Book-II, which enumerates the parameters of comedy. It is the forbidden book which is kept in the Finis Africae of the Aedificium. Each of the monks who is in search of this forbidden book, is executed by some insidious plan or the other of Jorge, the blind octogenarian father who professes profound faith and preaches the dawning of the apocalypse. The Comedy may or may not have existed but the significance of revelry as against pain and suffering which is what life should be according to Jorge is striking. William is the precursor of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, a thorough bred detective who would certainly occupy the first places among the world’s greatest trouble shooters. Yet William is devout. He is an inquisitor not by choice but by compulsion. His foremost aim is to redeem the teachings of St. Francis. He reminds me of the saying, “What one needs to know about the world is all there, right inside one’s self.”
William talks about the hastiness of faith and the secularity of religion. The church has become a bastion of order ‘a monolith which will stifle all dissension and suppress all heresy.’ When individual whim, fascination or vision breaks out it takes the form of a sect, an order, a movement which will try to break free and propound its doctrine. At times it could be the denunciation of the church and its craving for riches. In the history of Christianity there have been several uprisings, loving and celebrating the poverty of Christ. William thus represents the voice of reason combating the intenseness of blind faith, which has become dogmatic and censorious. The commitment to plurality and diversity when the world around reeks of rigidity reminded me of the principles of Semiotics, “The inexhaustibility of the sign.” On the title the author remarks that the “Rose is a symbolic figure so rich in meaning that by now it hardly has any meaning left".
It is a marvelous piece of fiction. I especially liked Adso’s description of the carvings and engravings on the church and the beauty of the seated Christ. The association of the words and the symbolism of the images, together with the supernatural subtlety of the plot rendered in terrifying prose, sent the chill down my spine. (To be continued)