Book Review | The Prague Cemetery

Search me. But scores of Umberto Eco's fans will be wanting to tuck into his latest bestseller The Prague Cemetery (Random House) - all about Eco's tricksy tale of anti-semitism emanating from this very cemetery. Indeed, the great trick Eco pulls off here is the combination and the origin of a hoax that led to genocide combined elsewhere in this book with an often light-hearted touch, apart from many other disagreeable and unpalatable traits.

In his previous bestseller Foucault's Pendulum, there are three publishers who decide to invent the world's ultimate conspiracy theory and succeed in cleverly re-interpreting European history from the medieval period, right through the 20th century.

The publishers then grasp the horror of what they have unearthed and to the real reason of this century's holocaust and becomes analogous to his new novel where a gloomy and pervasive darkness comes in the form of the protocols of the elders of Zion, those faked tsarist documents of the early 20th century, purporting to reveal a world-wide dominating plot of the Jewish people.

However, it is Eco himself who here is playing with history, and to tell how the story of such a hideously influential forgery came to be in the first place.

Eco's cinematic flashbacks sweep through a very baffling albeit readable material containing scores of betrayal, terrorism, murder, forgery and yes, gourmandising. Eco's only mythical figment is one Captain Simonini, where Eco tastefully evokes Paris in a 19th century fin de siècle. But Simonini has a chronic problem. His doppelganger - in the form of a cleric - invades his apartment while he is asleep, reads his diaries and adds to them himself, and it transpires that through his diaries Simonini comes curiously close to salient and pivotal events pertaining to that period spanning Garibaldi's campaign against the bourbons to the Dreyfus affair.

Simonini is sought by shadow figures in the police, the government, the secret service and through his forgery skills. However a key factor of this weird tale of split personalities and demonic priests, bomb making anarchists, a weird high priestess is that all his dramatic personae are real, except for forger extraordinaire - Simonini himself. But who is Simonini?

Elsewhere in the book there emerge humourous touches. Apart from some distinctly disagreeable traits, Simonini is an absent-minded ruthless killer.

He is also a racist and his earlier rantings list the shortcomings of Europe and its people as more than a nodding sign towards the more hardline Euro-haters and further towards the book's resonant climax, a Russian agent gives Simonini a reason for his anti-semitism: "We need an enemy to give people hope? You don't love someone for your whole life but you can hate someone for your whole life - provided he is there to keep your hatred alive."

Depending on the reader's literary skills and knowledge, in Prague Cemetery, Eco demonstrates a lesson about the evils of anti-semitism. Others say it smacks of a mish-mash of a never-ending game of snakes and ladders at best... or a monumental and mind-boggling jigsaw puzzle at times.

Also, less gifted writers stressed how his protagonists depicted therein could be so easily and unhesitatingly persecuted and demonised. Yet despite the darkness he so coloured this novel in, Eco stands out as one of literature's contemporary greatest optimists - go figure!