People in that age did not expect the world, or their own lives, to make much sense as a linear narrative. As a way, perhaps, to discerning the characteristics of the postmodern era, Eco tries to give us a sense of the European mind on the eve of modernity, before the epistemes of the modern era overwhelmed other ways of understanding the world. Together, these two epistemes constitute the mind of modernity. The episteme of the nineteenth century, in contrast, was evolutionary in its view of both the physical world and of society. As exemplified by Linnaeus's system of biological classification, the Enlightenment mind was a-historical, given to discerning timeless formal patterns. If you believe Foucault (the twentieth century deconstructionist, not a man after whom any type of pendulum is named), the eighteenth century was a time of logical, schematic knowledge. " The Island of the Day Before" is even more ambitious, since we are treated to nothing less than a tour of the episteme of the 17th century. (Of course, Eco's occult conspiracy was not as good as the one in Theodore Roszak's underappreciated novel, " Flicker," but you can't have everything.) In " Foucault's Pendulum," we became much the wiser about the subsidy publishing business while following what I for one think was a slightly superior occult conspiracy. In " The Name of the Rose," we learned a great deal about late medieval ecclesiastical politics in the course of a story that did not pretend to be anything more than a merry parody of a Sherlock Holmes adventure. This, of course, is the method of good "hard" science fiction, which leaves the reader usefully instructed in certain principles of physics or biology after reading a story that otherwise closely resembles a Western. The trick is to use the book as a lecture room in which to instruct the reader in the milieu of some historical period or social setting, but without waxing tediously didactic. Umberto Eco, professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna, has written this kind of novel more than once. The author and the reader can know that the world, or at any rate the story, is meaningless the characters' job is to try to find meaning and to fail in the attempt. Of course, it would not do to have the characters ever quite realize just how much they are wasting their time. Doubtless there has to be some unifying thread of plot to keep the whole thing together, but the treasure chest the characters have been seeking must always turn out to be empty. If you believe you live in a world where getting there is not just half the fun but the only fun you are likely to have, novels should be written as a garland of digressions. Boy goes on quest in order to find a way to determine longitude. Boy grows up during the Thirty Years' War.
No matter how complicated a novel's plot or how subtle its message, all reviews of novels should start by telling you what the book is about.
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