I normally enjoy the work of Umberto Eco. A professor as well as a novelist, he all but invented the field of semiology, the study of the meaning of signs and symbols. It isn’t too long a step from this to his celebrated fascination with conspiracy theories, which I have long shared. Like Eco, I set out from the premise that all such theories are false, created to benefit their fabricators and promoters in some way. They can very easily turn dangerous, even lethal, and are intrinsically evil in any case, for they are nothing more nor less than inflammatory lies told with the intent of making trouble.
The Prague Cemetery is the origin-story of one of the most infamous conspiracy theories of all. It is the third of Eco’s novels that I have read. The other two were also about conspiracy-theories and forgeries: The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum. I greatly enjoyed the first and absolutely delighted in the second, so I took up the present volume with high hopes. When I found that it was a historical novel set in Europe during the revolutionary phase of the nineteenth century, my hopes rose even higher; history, after all, is my subject. Here, I thought, is just the dish for me.
The confusing opening sequence threw me a little, though all was easily (and perhaps too soon) explained. When the real action began in a series of flashbacks, I readied myself for a treat. The first part of the novel is set in Italy during the Risorgimento, a period about which I knew little and was keen to learn more. Forewarned by Eco that, apart from the central character, nearly everyone else in the novel is a real person, I read through this part of the story with my phone beside me, googling away at names and historical references. This slowed my reading down a bit, and probably kept me from getting properly into the story, but without it I should have been even more quickly put off, because the text is full of references to historical events and persons and much of the interest of the tale depends on the reader knowing who and what the main ones are.
Meanwhile, another obstacle to reading pleasure had manifested itself. The central character, Simone Simonini, is a selfish, cynical, apparently asexual misogynist and introvert without a single redeeming quality in his make-up. It was Eco’s self-confessed ambition to create the most repulsive character in all of fiction (Shakespeare’s Richard III was the target he set himself to beat) and though he, arguably, succeeded, he did so at the expense of his book. Much of the tale is told in the first person and even the parts that aren’t are still largely focused on the protagonist, so Simonini’s repulsiveness rubs off on the novel itself. By the time the Risorgimento sequence ended and the action moved to Second-Empire Paris, where Simonini, who is employed by various secret services as a secret agent and fabricator of inflammatory propaganda, has been sent to make trouble, I was thoroughly nauseated, so I put the damned thing down for good. It had taken me almost a month (a pretty busy one, I must admit) to get through about two hundred pages.
The Prague Cemetery was published when Umberto Eco was eighty, and although he still had all his marbles at the time, the book is indubitably an old man’s work, with all the infirmities and deficits that we, the superannuated, must endure in our declining years. Skip it is my advice, and – if you haven’t already – read Foucault’s Pendulum instead. At least that one has pretty girls in it.
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