The Name of the Rose takes a while to get into. The opening sections are dense and demand a certain patience, but somewhere along the way it becomes genuinely addictive, and by the end it’s hard to believe you almost gave up on it.
On the surface it’s a murder mystery set in a medieval Italian abbey, and it works well as one. Brother William is essentially Sherlock Holmes in a monk’s habit, his novice Adso trailing behind him doing a very credible Watson impression. The monastery itself, its hierarchy, its secrets, its strange cast of inhabitants, is one of the most vividly realised settings I’ve come across in fiction. Even in the smallest interactions you get an immediate sense of what each character holds dear and where their limits lie.
But the mystery is almost secondary to what the book is actually doing, which is asking a much more uncomfortable question: can knowledge be gatekept? And should it be? The abbey’s library sits at the centre of everything, a place of carefully controlled access where certain texts are kept from those deemed unfit to read them. The people responsible for this aren’t monsters. They have a coherent logic, a genuine belief that some ideas are too dangerous for certain minds. Eco makes you sit with that logic long enough to understand it, even as the novel is quietly pulling it apart.
It feels less like medieval history and more like something recognisably contemporary, which is probably why it has stayed with me.
It also feels like a novel that couldn’t be more timely. At a moment when book bans are accelerating and the arguments for them sound remarkably familiar, the idea that someone always believes they’re protecting others by controlling what they read, and always believes they’re the right person to make that call, lands differently than it might have a decade ago.
Which books have made you think most seriously about who gets to decide what knowledge is accessible, and to whom?
by failed_bildungsroman
2 Comments
*The Name of the Rose* took me about 30 seconds to get into, honestly, but you’re right about the rest! It’s a great exploration of whether there is some knowledge that should kept from most people. The specific knowledge gatekept in the book isn’t the most extreme example, but it still raises the question just as you’ve said.
My opinion is that access to information should be a right, but that people should be very discerning about what information they want to open themselves up to. Ultimately, the question comes down to whether Nietzsche was right about what happens when we stare into the abyss.
For other examples, I think *1984* is a pretty obvious one. Maybe *Fahrenheit 451*, but that one is self-imposed. *Crime and Punishment*, *Heart of Darkness*, *Frankenstein*, *Things Fall Apart*, *The Picture of Dorian Gray*, maybe even *Paradise Lost* all have similar themes, though not necessarily about books in particular.
man, umberto eco really did something there. the whole library setup in that book – where the monks decide which books are too dangerous for regular people to read – it’s like watching censorship happen in real time but with this religious justification that almost makes sense until you really think about it.
i remember reading fahrenheit 451 in high school and thinking it was just about burning books, but going back to it later made me realize how much it’s about who controls information flow. the firemen think they’re protecting society from dangerous ideas, just like eco’s monks. both groups genuinely believe they know what’s best for everyone else.
what really gets me is how these characters never see themselves as the bad guys – they always have this moral framework that justifies everything. makes you wonder how many times we accept information being filtered without even realizing it’s happening.