The Prague Cemetery - Review

Umberto Eco returns to the scene of his crimes to charming (and exhausting) effect

In a typically brief foreword to his critically acclaimed first trio of short stories, the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges once claimed that 'it is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books - setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes.'

True to form, he never wrote in fiction anything longer than a short story, and some of these were bracingly quick reads - four or five pages. Often I'll read something and think of that quote, which is surely the ultimate litmus test of any serious writer, but it seems an uncanny critique of Umberto Eco's work - ironic, as his style strongly derives from him.

The Prague Cemetery is more than 400 pages, and was hailed as a return to form when it was first released. It quickly sold over a million copies in - guess what - South America and Europe. And I enjoyed it a lot, but probably for precisely the reasons a few have suggested it slightly flabby and supported by its sense of self-importance, rather than anything traditional like character.

Eco is a semiotician, and a world-renowned one at that, so you can expect some gymnastics in vocabulary, some loose unravelling of a thread that dangles pointlessly but prettily. It's a little unfortunate however that this story has already been told - by Eco himself, in a previous novel.

A tale of conspiracies abound in fin-de-siècle Europe, Eco weaves a charming tapestry of real-life characters around the fictional creation of Simone Simonini and his alter ego Abbe Dalla Piccola. Simonini is the grandson of the (real) Italian soldier and captain of the same name who becomes the spider at the centre of a pulsating web of intrigue, a master forger who sells his trade to Italian generals, French spies and Russians who use his gifts for fabrication to influence real life events.

And so we gallivant round Europe with young Simonini as he sinks fleets, helps imprison the elites and kills the innocent. Europe becomes a brothel with everyone screwing everyone, from the Freemasons to the Jesuits to the 19th century's favourite villain, the Jews. There is an exceptionally black mass that may be the high(low)light of the book, depending on your taste.

It's all in a day's work for an antihero but we've been here before. Eco's fascination with the invented influencing the everyday popped up in 1988 under the name Foucault's Pendulum, when a conspiracy theory propagated by three publishers infatuates the wrong sort of people, leading to murder and dizzying levels of mystery.

It's a shame that this isn't quite as good as that book but this is both a clever and educating read. Eco suggested in an interview in 2012 that people were 'bored' and 'wanted to be challenged' in their lives, hence the prevailing popularity of conspiracies.

For the same reasons, you can easily become bored with this book. If you're not a fan of late 19th century European history this will really drag, saturated as it is with both the events and characters of the time. It's occasionally difficult to discern what is relevant to the story and what isn't and some of the recipes propagated by characters like Alexandre Dumas have more flavour than the numerous villains who flit in and out of the shadows. Much like the corkscrew nature of the plot, you might have difficult keeping their names straight.

The Prague Cemetery is a lovely wind-up toy and, depending on your appreciation (I'm a fan) you'll indulge the author to keep winding long after the toy has run down its gears. It would certainly make a fascinating five minute conversation.

Picture courtesy of Non Modern Blog

Thoughts on Orhan Pamuk

A really fascinating guy to chew over when you've got absolutely nothing else to be concerned about.

A Great Introduction To Writing Great Introductions



"Watson, Movember is over. Now shave that bloody thing off, it looks terrible"

Just read this fantastic introduction to Conan Doyle's The Adventure of the Red-Headed League (part of the Five Orange Pips... short story collection)

"Now, Mr Jabez Wilson here has been good enough to call upon me here this morning, and to begin a narrative which promises to be one of the most singular which I have listened to for some time. You have heard me remark that the strangest and most unique things are very often connected not with the larger but with the smaller crimes,  and occasionally, indeed, where there is room for doubt whether any positive crime has been committed. As far as I have heard, it is impossible for me to say whether the present case is an instance of crime or not, but the course of events is certainly amongst the most singular that I have ever listened to. Perhaps, Mr Wilson, you would have the great kindness tor recommence your narrative. I ask you not merely because my friend Dr Watson has not heard the opening part, but also because the peculiar nature of the story makes me anxious to have every possible detail from your lips. As a rule, when I have heard some slight indication of the course of events I am able to guide myself by the thousands of other similar cases which occur to my memory. In the present instance I am forced to admit that the facts are, to the best of my belief, unique."

I love the detail of the rationale for repetition here - there's dozens of different examples of writers introducing stories/ characters into their work and there are plenty of uninteresting ways of doing it (**if you're interested or just a cynic when it comes to good/ bad writing check out Selected Essays by Gore Vidal - his lowdown on the New York Times bestseller list of 1974 is both chucklesome and humourless in its dressing down of lots of the big names at the time of writing**). Plenty of folk would point to an aesthetic compulsion as motivation for this calibre of composition but I think it owes more to Conan Doyle's meticulous nature in his paid work as a physician.

It's a fine writer in my eyes that combines fun (enjoyable, not instructive) with the tapestry on show here. Conan Doyle, like his ineffably precise sleuth, weaves a net to catch all possible queries on re-publishing Mr Wilson's tale.

There's the intellectual element - perhaps the strongest component - demonstrated when Holmes remarks that 'the strangest and most unique things are very often connected not with the larger but with the smaller crimes' - the groundwork for why the tale must be repeated is laid here with barely a creak or a groan as it's tamped in.

There's the 'real time' element - Watson strolls in to find his compadre with a total stranger, which you'd expect of any half decent scribbler in the same scenario - thirdly the oh-so-subtle 'As a rule...' which anyone familiar with Holmes's ruthlessly rational mind will immediately come to agreement with (the real trick there is of course parlaying the reader into agreement of this approach through previous strong characterisation) and finally Holmes requiring the tale again to cross-reference against his previous casework - adding depth, history and a flourish of his personality into the mix.

I've written here before that Conan Doyle's talent for granite characterisation could withstand tectonic movements in a tale (where planned obviously - Holmes is but a man) but this seemed like a particularly eloquent unfurling of a very good yarn.

Sherlock Holmes Solves Everything For Everybody And Still Leaves You Wanting More

So I just finished reading The Hound of the Baskervilles which is of course a book starring (for the most part) Sherlock Holmes. A persistently brilliant read and the reason I choose the former adjective is due to the positively canine behavioural traits of the star of the show, one Mr Sherlock Holmes.

The introduction to The Hound... by art and film buff and general broadcasting guru Christopher Frayling makes clear that Holmes is a singular man in the romantic and 'existential' sense if you'll permit me (I intend to stay clear of terms such as 'epistemology' throughout here as frankly they're a turn-off) beginning with that astonishing opening in which a curly haired spaniel materializes from Holmes's deductive reasoning of a walking stick with distinctive marks in the middle (n.b Holmes reasons through intuition that the dog carried the stick by the teeth - one thing I did really enjoy about this incidentally was the unspoken detail that the marks in the middle indicated equal weighting on each side should the stick be carried horizontally, which is of course exactly how a dog would behave. James Wood talks about stuff like this in How Fiction Works - seems to me to be fiendishly hard to do but I digress) which the trusty (yes it's a dog metaphor) Dr Watson brings to his master's attention (yada yada).

Hound of the Baskervilles has been variously touted as an attack of the Id on the ego (step up Freudians), an attack of the proletariat on the bourgeoisie (step up Marxists), a treatise on rationalism (step up philosophers) and as a detective story (the other 90%). For me leaving aside the underlying metaphorical stuff this book is just a consistently amazing example of how to write really great detective fiction. I've read quite a lot of this stuff in my youth and I've travelled the globe in my narrative escapades - I've read Mankell and some of Larsson in Sweden, Chandler in LA, Christie in most of England and Europe and Le Carre in Berlin and London. I'm a cultured guy when it comes to this genre. But Kurt Wallander will never be played by Lucy Liu. What makes a detective and his compatriot so popular they can be watched by millions a century after they retired?

Lots of people (alright, everyone) will say 'it's the story, dummy' and it is. BUT it isn't just that is it? Arch clever guy Umberto Eco studied a great deal of Conan Doyle's - and by extension Holmes's - superlative techniques and dextrously weaved them into The Name of the Rose. The novel is set in a Franciscan monastery in which an 'outsider' (read; non-superstitious weirdo) comes in and begins to use his environment, temporality, cause and effect and intuition into behaviours by those around him to build a picture of the murderer, who he eventually gets (although not without the bodies piling up). Eco's point is that the deductive qualities of Holmes are in fact vastly heightened qualities that we ourselves have and use to make sense of the world around us on a regular basis.

Detective stories come in many hues but Holmes and his wit seem somehow life-affirming; unlike the miserablist Larsson who, being brutally frank, comes across as a bit too nihilistic to be taken very seriously (there's only one way to do nihilism: with a smile). Conan Doyle makes the facts of the case stand up and tell their story and that's the engaging part; the interaction, the mingling of these pieces of evidence which are alive and say things to each other - not to mention the ingeniously innocuous nature of some of them (the boot that goes missing from outside Henry Baskerville's hotel room upon his arrival in London is one of the best 'elements' of a story I've read and is weaved in such simple colours) all of which suggest both nothing and something deeply odd all at once.

The Hound is also particularly famous for its depiction of Dartmoor. With its huddle of stone dwellings once occupied by prehistoric man and wails of legendary beasts swirling in the fog, the clarity and steadfast logic of a clearly thrilled Holmes stands in stark contrast to a beautifully realised canvas, almost impressionist in its ethereal wastelands and inhospitable mires. The inferences of man versus his environment and specifically the science of reason against the unspoken laws of superstition and whimsy are drawn with subtlety and simplicity at every stroke; at just 160 pages long the pervasively sinister atmosphere is sketched expertly and creeps in every page the lonesome Watson spends there with his charge. Conan Doyle spent time there with former journalist and Express editor Fletcher Robinson and as a serving doctor in the Boer War it's obvious the guy's got previous with desolate open environments. The seal of approval may well come from the poet T.S. Eliot, who was fairly familiar with the composition of the dearth of humanity himself and was reportedly a huge fan of Holmes's.

The above may be another strong reason for the enduring popularity of this, Holmes's best-loved and most-read tale. Garlanded with praise like no other work by Conan Doyle, it's hard not to notice the familiar theme of man overcoming uncertainty - and almost certain death by what can be variously interpreted as hereditary traits and the sins of others through to sheer fear and ignorance of death and its consequences to master all within his realm by relying on his own wherewithal and intellectual ability.

I could go on and on about this book - it's that good and delivers with so much economy of prose on such a consistently high plateau that this 'review' or whatever is something of a knockabout thing in assessing its merits and powers, but the greatest praise I guess I could pay The Hound is that I will seriously consider seeing how Lucy Liu gets on if she travels to Dartmoor.