Foucault's Pendulum

Englands's The Telegraph reports:

"...The Vatican was not keen on Foucault's Pendulum, by all accounts. Its official newspaper described it as being full of 'profanations, blas-phemies, buffooneries and filth, held together by the mortar of arrogance and cynicism'..."

A friend of mine, Sam McNally, is an accomplished pianist and session man, who manages to fit in a few gigs a year at The Basement, Sydney's premier jazz venue. Now, Sam can cut it with just about any band in the land but his thing is jazz rock, you know the type of music that start with a recognisable song and rapidly goes into free-form, doodling type of stuff that Weather Report used to do back in the early 1970s.

You have to concentrate, you can't lose yourself in it, you have to, well, watch it. Watch it, admire, and wait for the pay-off, the return to the main riff. Foucault's Pendulum, Umberto Eco's follow-up to The Name Of The Rose is a lot like that. Boy, does Eco know how to depart from the theme. Clocking in at around 800 pages, Eco could easily have done it in half that many...but that would be like asking Sam to put on a pop concert instead of a jazz gig. That's his thing, let him be.

Foucault's Pendulum is centered around three intellectuals who are paid to edit vanity books on esoteric & quasi-religious subjects for limited edition publishing. Things start to take a turn when a mysterious "Colonel" turns up with a cliche-ridden manuscript about The Knights Templar, then promptly disappears.

Foucaults Pendulum: a novel by Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco: Foucault's Pendulum

After going their seperate ways for a few years, the three reunite for another esoteric project and start to play a game for their own cynical amusement, feeding info about every major cult:

Ancient Celts
Druids
Freemasons
Rosaecrucians
Masons
Nazis, etc.

...into a computer* (codename: God), enjoying the ludicrous results that it turns up. Unfortunately for trio, what starts to emerge is a Conspiracy Theory to end all conspiracy theories.

It appears that The Knights Templar seems to possess an esoteric knowledge that many of the worlds great monuments, Stonehenge, The Eiffel Tower etc. weren't built on just any available space of land, they were built on nodes of the Earth's power grid, the earth's telluric energy.

The Knights Templar have been waiting to harness this global energy for hundreds of years, an energy that far surpasses even nuclear energy, which will allow them to subjugate the world...and that time is now.

Unfortunately, outside of the computer, the real-world modern Knights Templar find out about our intellectuals "research" and decide that our three literary musketeers are getting a litle too close to the truth...and set out to eliminate them.

Of course, Foucault's Pendulum is just one giant, very dry joke e.g. one of the intellectuals, the main protagonist, Causabon, is a young History professor, who just happens to have the same name as the greatest 16th century scholar, once regarded as the most learned man in Europe, which our modern Causabon certainly is not.

At another level, part of the joke is the idea that Causabon & friends' join-the-dots conjecture theory can become very dangerous when it's presented as fact and that those who do so are doing something terribly irresponsible.

If you can and are prepared to indulge Eco, you'll find a book that is rich in its discussion, as laden with gold and treasures as a Spanish galleon returning from the New World. If you're online, you can receive several hundred hours worth of education in obscure trivia by one of Italy's most famous academics, simply by going to Wikipedia for every bit you don't get e.g. as I did with Causabon.

Umberto Eco: Foucault's Pendulum

On the other hand, these constant meanderings, subtle and not-so-subtle layerings may eventually irritate you and you'll long for the simplicity of a well-written thriller. As I said, Foucault's Pendulum is a lot like Sam McNally's jazz-rock and the pay-off of the wild impros are the return to the theme. Can you dig that?

The real Foucault's Pendulum explained

* the p.c. was then a very new gadget