The Name of the Rose, A Review

     It has taken me a while to read this 502 page novel. Not because it is not interesting. It certainly is but Umberto Eco's passion for medieval history and language are very evident in this book. First off, like any Eco novel, it is well researched and the atmosphere feels authentic. You cannot fault him with any anachronisms or misinformation but he does go on a bit too long about the various heresies of the 13th and 14th centuries. However, some of this information is important to the back story of why William of Baskerville is at this Abbey in the mountains of northern Italy waiting for a delegation from the Pope when a young monk suddenly dies.
    The Abbot approaches William and asks him to investigate, although everyone believes it is a suicide, because William had been an Inquisitor for the Church at one time. William duly begins asking questions in the Scriptorum where the recently dead had worked and finds that there was indeed something mysterious about the young man's death. When another monk is found dead, soon after, it becomes clear that there is a murderer on the loose at the Abbey and William is engaged in a race against time to solve the murders before the Papal delegation arrives with the formidable and sinister Grand Inquisitor Bernard Gui at its head while the body count rises. Since the Abbot will not allow William to enter the Library, in the day or night, William must resort to stealth by night in the labyrinth of the Aedificium as it quickly becomes clear that the murders involve some forbidden book that is hidden in the library.
      The story is told from William's helper, the young novice Adso of Melk in the form of a memoir that Adso writes as he is nearing the end of his life. I recommend the book but, if anyone finds the discussions of medieval heresies or philosophy a bit wearying, they can easily be skipped over without losing anything essential to the story.

      Eco has written a nice introduction to the book, explaining his inspiration for the novel and he has also written a fairly lengthy postscript including a discussion of the source for the name.  He does not come out and say who or what is the 'Rose' of the title as he believes that, once the book is published, the reader is free to interpret the book as they see it. He writes that it is not the authors's job to tell the reader how to interpret the work and any interpretation could be equally valid. That being said, he does offer up the source for the Latin with which he ends the story: "stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus." as I translate it, "The pristine rose stands rose by name, we hold the name as evident." It is indeed a mystery.

     It is an odd little line because, in the source that Eco names, De Contemptu Mundi by Bernard of Morlay, available here in the original latin, the line is "Nunc ubi Regulus aut ubi Romulus aut ubi Remus? Stat Roma pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus." line 951-952.  "Where now is Regulus, or Romulus or Remus? The original Rome stands Rome by name, we understand the name."

In Book 1, line 177, there is a line about a rose "Tunc rosa sanguine, lilia virgine mente micabunt, gaudia maxima te pia lacrima te recreabunt." translated by me as "then, the lily gleams like the virgin mind, they recreate for you the great joy of your pious tear with the blood colored rose."

line 455 "Mox rosa fit rubus, ipseque cras pia, nunc rosa, cras fex." "Soon the rose will become red, Hereafter itself good, the rose is thereafter dregs."
line751 " O caro lactea, nunc rosa, postea sarcina vilis, flos tibi corruet et rose defluet haec iuvenilis....quid rosa? Foenum. " O milky flesh, now the rose, afterwards a burden of little value,the flower is corrupting to you and the rose proves unfaithful to the youthful of her......what is the rose? Hay."

The piece that Eco referred to is, in his own words, a variant on the ubi sunt theme. That is where have they gone?
It would be too easy to say the Rose is the girl who Adso meets in the kitchen one night and has sex with.  However the rose has so many meanings in medieval literature, one cannot be certain an event that was merely a footnote in a murder mystery was the most important event in the entire story that Adso tells about the Abbey. Perhaps it was the most important thing to Adso, but he never knows her name. The film with Sean Connery deviates a little from the book in the fate of the rose, although the novel is truer to what would have been her likely fate, which is more satisfying to a modern audience. Finally, I am not sure if Eco himself has a clear vision of who or what he meant the Rose to be.

Wolf Hall, a Review

Here I am, late to the party, writing a review for a book when the sequel is already out. The subject matter is a popular one, especially following The Tudors series on television.

When any author writes a historical novel, the first question that must arise in any readers mind is how true to the events is it?I do not claim to be a Tudor scholar and know all the facts but it seems clear the author, Hilary Mantel, has chosen what to emphasize and what to downplay and thereby induce the reader to a certain point of view.

She appears to have stuck to the facts as well as we can know them. Of course the day to day lives of the participants has not been recorded and conversations must be surmised but I think she did a great job of bringing the characters to life and in keeping with the age that they lived. Mantel has chosen to portray Thomas More as a cold blooded villain and Cromwell a pragmatic humanist. While she has portrayed Anne as a sincere driving force behind the reform of the Church, she has also portrayed her as shrewish and conniving.

I feel a certain amount of pity for Anne. Her first engagement to Henry Percy was broken off by the married king who had designs on her for himself. She had already seen what being the king's mistress was like by witnessing what her sister, Mary, went through. Anne was already about 24 or 25 when the king had noticed her. It took seven years for the divorce from Henry's first wife to go forward. In the meantime Katherine was undiminished in her popularity, Anne was hated and there was threats against her life. By the time Henry married her, Anne was 32 or 33 and past her child bearing prime. How difficult must those years have been? As well as taking the place of a beloved monarch, she was a party to the break with the Church of Rome. After her fall, who would speak of her kindly? No one until her daughter became queen.

Was she as abrasive as she was made out to be? No doubt to some she was, she lived in rather trying circumstances. Was Cromwell the consummate civil servant dedicated to the process of reform? We know he became very wealthy under that reform. Not all the wealth of the monasteries made it into Henry's coffers. Was More the cold hearted Grand Inquisitor he was made out to be? In his lifetime, he denied torturing heretics and he is said to have educated all of the women in his household.

Cromwell is seen reading Cicero, with whom he shares a few characteristics. After all, they were both lawyers, 'new' men to the aristocracy, activists in their pursuit of the corrupt established order. Unlike Cicero, Cromwell was not afraid to take up the sword but, like Cicero, he will end with his head lopped of for running afoul of the powers that be. More reminds me of Cato the Younger for his ascetic sensibilities and his fearlessness in the face of death. Henry VIII could be likened to Theodoric the Great. He began as a great leader but devolved into paranoia and capriciousness, viewed as a heretic and responsible for the execution of a pope as well as a great man of letters Boethius. Theodoric, as well as Henry, had concubines, and left a daughter behind to rule which created instability in his realm. The War of the Roses having occurred so recently, was still firmly in everyone's memory and Henry was sincerely concerned with having the succession cinched with a son so as to not plunge the country into that sort of nightmare again.

After reading an interview with the author, I still find the choice of the title odd. After all, the novel begins with a chance meeting between the young More and Cromwell and ends with Cromwell orchestrating More's execution. In between that, is Henry's efforts to receive official sanction from Rome to marry Anne. The main thing preventing the annulling of the marriage to Katherine of Aragon was that her nephew was the Holy Roman Emperor and was holding the Pope hostage. This was one of the main arguments against bowing to the authority of Rome is that it was often loyal to a hostile prince.

That being said, following the break with Rome, the king and his archbishop of Canterbury, Cranmer, were excommunicated and by this act the king's palace effectively becomes a hall of 'wolves'. Wolf was another name for 'outlaw'. On page 531, when Cromwell became Master Secretary, he remembered Norfolk's words to Wolsey, during the cardinal's fall from grace, and he thought to himself 'homo homini lupus', which she translated as 'man is wolf to man'. Certainly people are preying upon other people throughout the novel.

The Wolf Hall of the title is not Cromwell's home, nor is it More's. It is not even a residence of Anne Boleyn but the home of the Seymours and does not ever even come into the tale except briefly as a rumour of some sort of scandal which had taken place there. Jane Seymour, Henry's third wife, flits in and out of the story as she was a lady in waiting to Queen Katherine and then Queen Anne. Mantel has Cromwell toy with the idea of making Jane his own wife, an astonishing suggestion for which I cannot truly say if she had any historical evidence. However this is a novel not a history.

In the interview with Peter Mares, she said that she ended the story with More's execution but Henry is planning his summer excursions and that he will end up at Wolf Hall. This does not take place in the story. In which case, perhaps the sequel should be called Wolf Hall but instead she resorted to the rather dubious title of 'Bring Up the Bodies' for it. Someone should assist her with the next title.