The setting is November 1327 in an abbey in the mountains of northern Italy. A highly learned English Franciscan monk William of Baskerville (formerly an Inquisitor) arrives with his aide, an Italian Benedictine novice named Adso of Melk to mediate a dispute between religious factions and investigate rumored claims of heresy. But just before their arrival, there is a mysterious death of a monk who falls from a high tower in the library. It is not clear if it was suicide or he was pushed but soon there occur a series of gruesome deaths so that it becomes clear that there is a serial killer at work and William sets about trying to unravel the mystery. He becomes convinced that the answer lies with a book that has been hidden away in a labyrinth in the fortress-like library which is zealously guarded by the librarian and the abbot to prevent anyone gaining access to some of the books.

William is described early in the book as having powers of observation and analysis that enables his to reach conclusions that amaze others (including Adso) by their perspicacity. He is an admirer of Francis Bacon and William of Occam and the scientific methods they demonstrated. He is clearly modeled on Sherlock Holmes (his name being a hint) and Adso, as the narrator of the book, is his Watson chronicling his actions. So far, so good. One is prepared for a murder mystery set in a remote abbey in the Middle Ages.

But the reader quickly runs into some very heavy weather. It is a long book (538 pages) which is daunting enough. But I have read longer books without difficulty. The main problem is that there are interminably long passages where the various monks debate the nature of heresy and whether the claims of some Franciscan sects that poverty was recommended by Jesus and that the church should abandon all wealth (an idea that the opulent churches and Pope and abbeys found subversive) was a heresy. They also debate whether Jesus ever laughed and whether Aristotle’s writings that praised laughter were also heretical. And so on. There were also complicated political intrigues involving shifting alliances with the Pope, the emperor, the abbots of the abbeys, and the wandering breakaway sects of monks. There are long debates about the beliefs of the various sects (whose names were all unfamiliar to me) and how they differed on fine points of doctrine. These did not interest me in the least, since the things they were arguing about seemed so trivial. Furthermore, the speakers often switch to speaking in Latin and these sometimes long passages are untranslated, so that the non-Latin speaking reader is left feeling further mystified.

These long esoteric debates took up huge portions, about two-thirds, of the book, especially in the first half or so, and I was beginning to find them so tedious that I was tempted to give up on the book altogether. But I am reluctant to stop reading books I have started, especially those that have been highly praised as this one was and so I plowed through, hoping to gain some insight into why it was so highly regarded. I adopted the method I had used to get through Moby Dick. Those who have read that book will recall that the main story of captain Ahab’s obsessive quest to to find and kill the great white whale is interspersed with very long passages about whales in general and the whaling industry in particular. While no doubt fascinating and informative and appeal to a certain type of certain reader, those passages left me cold and so I started skimming rapidly whenever I encountered such passages, doing just the minimum to make sure that I was not missing anything important concerning the rest of the book and Ahab’s quest.

I did the same thing with all the philosophical, theological, and political discussions in this book that I did with Moby Dick, skipping past them until I got to what, to me, was the most relevant. I am aware that purists will frown on my strategy, that in doing this with both books, I am missing some insights that the authors sought to convey to the reader in those passages. But I did not care. It was just too tedious to work my way through them otherwise. I wondered whether all this material had been included because Eco, a professor of semiotics who specializes in the Middle Ages, had done a lot of research on these matters and wanted an outlet for all the knowledge that he had acquired. That is something I can sympathize with as someone who also has learned a lot of detailed stuff that I find fascinating but most people do not care about. I have to really use will power to not bore people with that kind of minutiae. But at other times I felt a little less charitable and wondered whether Eco had succumbed to another temptation that academics have, of just showing off his erudition.

Unfortunately, even after all the theological material is stripped away, the murder mystery that remains is also sloppy and unsatisfying, so reading the book was, to me, largely a waste of time. Given that it was such a runaway best seller, I am clearly not the audience for it.

However, in a post script to the second edition of the book, Eco did something unusual for a novelist and explains why he wrote the way he did. He says that the first hundred pages were deliberately made difficult, because he was trying to create the kind of reader who would benefit from what came later by forcing them to deal with it.

But there was another reason for including those long didactic passages. After reading the manuscript, my friends and editors suggested I abbreviate the first hundred pages, which they found very difficult and demanding. Without thinking twice, I refused, because, as I insisted, if somebody wanted to enter the abbey and live there for seven days, he had to accept the abbey’s own pace. If he could not, he would never manage to read the whole book. Therefore those first hundred pages are like a penance or an initiation, and if someone does not like them, so much the worse for him. He can stay at the foot of the hill.

Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away.
…

What does it mean, to imagine a reader able to overcome the penitential obstacle of the first hundred pages? It means, precisely, writing one hundred pages for the purpose of constructing a reader suitable for what comes afterward.
…

What model reader did I want as I was writing? An accomplice, to be sure, one who would play my game. I wanted to become completely medieval and live in the Middle Ages as if that were my own period (and vice versa). But at the same time, with all my might, I wanted to create a type of reader who, once the initiation was past, would become my prey—or, rather, the prey of the text —and would think he wanted nothing but what the text was offering him. A text is meant to be an experience of transformation for its reader. You believe you want sex and a criminal plot where the guilty party is discovered at the end, and all with plenty of action, but at the same time you would be ashamed to accept old-fashioned rubbish made up of the living dead, nightmare abbeys, and black penitents. All right; then, I will give you Latin, practically no women, lots of theology, gallons of blood in Grand Guignol style, to make you say, “But all this is false; I refuse to accept it!”And at this point you will have to be mine, and feel the thrill of God’s infinite omnipotence, which makes the world’s order vain. And then, if you are good, you will realize how I lured you into this trap, because I was really telling you about it at every step, I was carefully warning you that I was dragging you to your damnation; but the fine thing about pacts with the devil is that when you sign them you are well aware of their conditions. Otherwise, why would you be recompensed with hell?

I don’t buy it, mainly because I reject the idea that one must do penance as a prerequisite to enlightenment. I do not think that one can ‘create’ the kind of reader one seeks to have by making them do ‘penance’ at the beginning of a book, as he calls the experience of fighting through a thicket of highly dense material. Those who already like semiotics and discussions on the nature of heresy and medieval political and religious intrigues will stick with it. For others, what it more likely does is weed out those who have no interest and stop reading or, like me, find ways to short-circuit the process. I got through to the end of the book by skipping massive chunks of text. In my mind, I avoided the hike up the mountain but did not stay at ‘the foot of the hill’ (as Eco says) but instead took the easy way out, the equivalent of a cable car to the top rather than trudge my way up. I am pretty sure that I did not become the type of reader Eco seeks to create since I have no desire to read any other books by him or on the topics he covered. I am sure that in Eco’s view, the loss is entirely mine, that I did not in fact reach the top of the hill because I was not willing to do the required penance and that is why I found the book so unsatisfying. He might argue that I just have the illusion that I reached the top. But that’s the way I see it.

But the book wasn’t a total loss. The postscript at least made me think about the extent to which a writer should try to coax the reader into continuing to read by making the material accessible or whether they should deliberately make it obscure so as to make them struggle. As a physics teacher of material that students sometimes find difficult, my goal was always to try and find ways to help them arrive at understanding it. Some aspects of it were undeniably hard and required students to grapple with it, but there was no excuse for me to make it even harder other than to discourage the less dogged students to give up and go away. There are some teachers who do think that way but I am not one of them. Maybe that is why I was unsympathetic to this book and the style of writing. But physics is different from literature, so there’s that.