Book Review - The Prague Cemetery (Umberto Eco)

Today I look at a novel from Italian author Umberto Eco – The Prague Cemetery is a historical fiction that spans central Europe for much of the 19^th century. It's told from three different perspectives: an Italian captain named Simonini; a priest named Abbe Dalla Piccola; and an unnamed narrator who pieces together a story from the combined writing of Simonini and the abbe.

I was drawn to this book because it's promise of continent-wide conspiracies intrigued me, as well as it's 19^th century setting. Seeing monumental events in recent history like the violence of the Paris Commune and the Dreyfus Affair was one of my favourite aspects of this book. However, on the whole I was extremely disappointed in The Prague Cemetery. It gets off to an intriguing start as we're given three seperate narrators (two of whom very clearly have split-personality disorder), which made me wonder if this was going to be some sort of surrealist text where you can't entirely trust what you're reading.

The more I read though, the less invested I became, and I was soon simply reading the story out of a sense of obligation, not genuine interest.

One of The Prague Cemetery's biggest flaws is this: it has no real characters. What it has are ciphers who exist to push the plot forward. Making matters worse is that nearly all of these characters are interchangeable. Nearly every character is either a scheming revolutionary, a scheming politician, a scheming civil servant, a scheming cleric, or a combination of the above. The one exception is the satanist Diana, and that's only because she exists to be a puppet of the main characters' whims. Instead of a cast of characters, we're given a conveyor belt of equally manipulative, devious and morally sterile people.

I soon began to forget the names of the various bureaucrats and employers Simonini encounters throughout his career, because all of them are equally faceless. Not to mention all of them have more or less the same ambitions and practices – namely to manipulate public opinion to serve their own interests.

Which brings me on to another big issue I have with this book: all of these characters are terrible people. Not only are they bland, stereotypical manipulators, but just about everyone is a colossal bigot. Anti-Semitism is the main focus of the book – I lost count of the amount of times someone goes off on a rant about how the Jews are conspiring to overthrow western civilization – but there's also plenty of misogyny, anti-Catholicism and racism to remind you of how loathsome all these characters are.

But Anti-Semitism is the main subject here. There are two variations: the rabid, fanatical anti-Semitism of the likes of Eduoard Drumont (whose appearance late in the story might have been a nasty shock if I hadn't long stopped caring), or else the empty cynicism of the likes of Simonini. Repeatedly in the story, Simonini forges material he claims to prove an internationalist Zionist plot (originating from a cemetery in Prague, where the book gets its name from) is taking place. His employers often know his “evidence” is fabricated, or else lifted wholesale from popular literature, but they publish it anyway to give the common people of Europe a scapegoat to distract them from the real forces controlling their lives.

This is one aspect of the story that gave me some interest – the idea that politicians and spin doctors openly lie to people to serve their own ends. But again, all of these characters are so shallow and interchangeable that it's hard for me to get invested. It's as if someone wanted to make a novel out of Yes Minister or The Thick of It, but forgot to give its characters flaws and nuances that make them relatable to the audience.

Something else that's sorely missing from this novel is an actual argument. You'd think a story that delves so far into a particularly ugly side of human history would have something of substance to say, or perhaps try to explain why people judge certain communities for being “Other”. It's a topic that's sadly as relevant in Europe today with the hostile response Middle Eastern refugees are facing. But for all it's posturing, The Prague Cemetery doesn't seem to have anything to add to the discussion of prejudice than “Man, prejudice sucks”.

It gives a dangerously simplistic portrayal of how prejudice works in the first place. Since every character in this book seems inherently awful, it gives the impression that bigotry can only exist if generated by inherently awful people. Writing about ordinary and sympathetic people who hold prejudices shows how insidious prejudice is, and might help readers to recognise it in themselves. Repeating the term “Final Solution” over and over does not help anyone better understand why the people of Germany attempted to annihilate several entire races in the 1940s.

Finally, I don't really get what the point of the multiple narratives was, or the split-personality. Seriously, nothing comes of it. It's clear from the start that Simonini and Dalla Piccola are the same person. Eco inserts gaps into their memories, meaning that both personalities have to write to jog the other half's memory. Why Eco didn't simply have a first or third-person narrative all the way through is beyond me.

If I can say anything good about this story, it's that the prose (translated by Richard Dixon) is nice enough, though Eco does like to go off on tangents a fair bit. The act of reading the book may have been a repetitive, often tedious experience, but at least it wasn't excruciating.

Could I recommend The Prague Cemetery? Not really. Not as a historical fiction, or a character study, or a commentary on prejudice, or a spy story, or a satire. Pretty much everything here has been done better.

Just watch Zootropolis instead.