I found reading The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco a chore as it was dense, slow moving and complex. Often touted as a whodunit, I would class the book as historical fiction as it is set in an Italian monastery in 1327, and the mystery also includes a fair amount of biblical analysis, medieval studies, and a slight knowledge of classical Latin as there are many quotes that need to be deciphered.

The story is told by Adso, a young novice monk who is travelling with William of Baskerville, who has been called upon to investigate a crime in a Benedictine abbey. Of course the deaths mount and it becomes apparent that William is on the trail of a conspiracy with both dangerous knowledge and the future of the Catholic Church hanging in the balance. William is a very interesting character and he sets about solving the mystery with logic, theology and his own innate curiosity and intelligence. The book is layered with history, religion and, the part I found most difficult, lengthy passages of medieval rhetoric.

Originally published in 1980, The Name of the Rose has won many awards and is considered a literary masterpiece. For me, it was just too long, too dense, and too difficult to keep track of. The many untranslated Latin passages made me feel uneducated and I suspect that I might have gotten more out of simply watching the 1986 film. ( )

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As Brother William of Baskerville, an English Franciscan monk, nears the Italian abbey where he’s to attend a conclave, he correctly deduces from tracks in the snow and other minute details that the party of brethren approaching him on the road are seeking a horse — whose name he also guesses.

Naturally, this astonishes both the search party and William’s companion, his scribe, a German novice named Adso. It also pleases the abbot, who’s delighted to have so keen an observer on hand, because a young monk has died under suspicious circumstances, and the mystery must be solved before the conclave takes place in a few days’ time.

Or, to be precise, the abbot seems pleased, but the readily apparent struggle between truth and expediency dividing the abbey’s occupants, heightened by the anticipated high-level meeting, clouds his motives.

The year is 1327, and the church is fighting itself, with one pope in Rome, and the other in Avignon. The expected French envoys — and, menacingly, their accompanying armed force — include a charismatic, unscrupulous inquisitor whom William knows and fears; he was once an inquisitor himself but gave it up because he felt the entire process of hunting heretics was irrational and unjust.

Since then, he has openly avowed the empirical philosophy of Roger Bacon and William Occam (he of the famous razor), beliefs that unsettle many other monks and, in their eyes, skate dangerously close to heresy.

Moreover, the abbot has forbidden William to investigate the library stacks, labyrinthine rooms that no one save the librarian himself may enter. This restriction cripples William’s efforts, particularly after more monks die, and he supposes that a hidden text holds the key. So, with Adso in tow, he invades the abbey’s sanctum sanctorum, with ever-startling results.

Adso makes a superb narrator and foil, a Watson scared of where knowledge will lead, to William’s Holmes, who thinks knowledge itself can be neither good nor evil. A weighty theme, and The Name of the Rose tips the scales at almost 600 pages, but Eco does a brilliant job focusing on two issues that, at first glance, seem too ridiculous to kill for, whether for personal motives, to serve the church, or for reasons of state.

First, did Christ ever laugh? And second, did he and his apostles choose poverty, the belief on which the Franciscan order rests?

But the narrative, if at length, shows why these questions matter in 1327 and today. If Christ did not laugh, the official reasoning goes, satire, jokes, and humor are either vile, a threat to faith, or both. However, William argues that if a devout person must have only a certain sober, humorless mind, then the inquisitors rule, as in fact they do, and the crucial precept of accepting faith through free will ceases to exist.

As William warns Adso, “The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer. Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.”

The question of poverty has a more immediate political implication. The Franciscan order has splintered, prompting rebellions against church power, to which the church has responded by burning heretics, charging the use of magic, and accusing their opponents of free love and appalling butchery. But as William tells Adso, the rebels don’t care about church doctrines, especially; they resent the extreme wealth of the church and the regimes it supports, both of which contribute to keep the poor as they are.

Amid all this, monks continue to die, and William must divert his efforts from solving the mystery to play politician during the conclave, standing up for his beliefs while avoiding condemnation. As you may have figured out by now (how did I give it away?), The Name of the Rose is a discursive book, but no less mesmerizing for that:

The Name of the Rose does what the best historical fiction should: illuminate the past by its own lights and therefore reveal the present. As a mystery, it is excellent; to that, add profundity and power. ( )

Brother William of Baskerville and his novice assistant play a 14th-century Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson as they investigate deaths taking place in a monastery about to be visited by two church delegations fighting each other for religious and secular control at a time of religious schisms that foreshadow the Reformation.

A huge, epic, at times maddeningly overwritten novel. When things were happening, it was an interesting book; when the author digressed (for pages and pages and pages), I found myself committing the cardinal sin of skipping the moment I saw one of these digressions coming. I'm not against digressions in books, I just want them to be relevant to the story, rather than being included because an Italian editor didn't have the guts to pull Umberto Eco aside and say, "Nice story. Do you mind if we cut out about a hundred pages total, from several different places, where nobody will miss them? You'll still have 700 pages left."

I hate to say this, but I really do believe that this story is best enjoyed as encapsulated by the film by the same name starring Sean Connery as the sleuthing monk and Christian Slater as his naive sidekick. The only reason I hesitate to endorse the movie over the book is that the movie doesn't quite do justice to the actual Church history that the novel is trying to capture, and which is itself interesting. Aside from that, you get a much more agile tale told in the context of the film. ( )