BooksReviewThe lavish illustrations in Umberto Eco's The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana outshine his pale characters, says Ian SansomThe Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana: An Illustrated Novel
by Umberto Eco, translated by Geoffrey Brock
464pp, Secker & Warburg, £17.99
Another parade, another outing, another great exhilaration from Umberto Eco, another pouring forth into story of his legendary wit and erudition, as if Peter Ustinov and Stephen Fry had been rolled up into the body of Dorothy L Sayers, berobed and begowned, and paraded around the ancient university towns of mainland Europe in a hand-cart: The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is a stately, imperial piece of work more grand than good, but utterly, eye-poppingly fascinating none the less. Like royalty and reality TV, it's a spectacle.
The book is essentially and specifically a profound meditation on the nature of memory and forgetting - but fortunately it also has a story, upon which and through which Eco's great procession makes its long, meandering way.
Giambattista Bodoni - or Yambo, as he is known - is an antiquarian bookdealer in Milan. It's the early 1990s, Yambo is in his 60s, and he's had an accident in which he seems to have lost his "episodic memory", but not his semantic memory: thus, he can remember, say, the name of the capital of Japan, but he can't remember the name of his wife. He has become, effectively, a walking, talking encylopaedia - a lot, in fact, like Eco himself.
When Yambo's autobiographical memory is sparked by images from a Mickey Mouse comic book his wife suggests that he go and visit the house he grew up in - an "immense house" out in the Italian countryside, where he was raised by a large and loving family during the second world war. Back at the old house, cared for by his now elderly but still loving nanny, he begins to reread the books he read as a child, and as he rereads them he finds his memories being restored, a process that is inevitably as painful as it is healing.
All this, of course, works brilliantly as a conceit; but alas only as a conceit. The characters, not surprisingly perhaps, fail to thrive in the long shadows cast by all the books that Eco/Yambo picks up and discusses, and they seem pale and uninteresting in comparison to the many beautiful illustrations from Yambo's favourite childhood books, which are reproduced in vivid colour, making The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana quite possibly and literally one of the most beautiful, if not exactly the most readable novels ever published. The use of illustrations and images in fiction is all very well and the very stuff of PhDs and learned articles on the work of WG Sebald, but surely the very least requirement for the average reader is that the author's clever use of illustrations doesn't outshine his or her clever use of words, otherwise we'd be as well off reading exhibition catalogues and coffee-table books on Caravaggio.
The most memorable parts of The Mysterious Flame are in fact those in which Eco does indeed match the brilliance and poignancy of his many picture images, in his superb descriptions of the big house and its attic, and in his careful rendering of Yambo's gradual recovery of his feelings for things: "I spent the afternoon testing things, feeling the pressure of my hand on a cognac glass, watching how the coffee rises in the coffee-maker, tasting two varieties of honey and three kinds of marmalade (I like apricot best), rubbing the living room curtains, squeezing a lemon, plunging my hands into a sack of semolina."
But there's a lot to get through to discover these little ephiphanies. The literary allusions come thick and fast - little pastiches of Joyce, for example - and Eco even recycles some old jokes from his own essays and back catalogue (including the old one - and it's certainly a good one, first published, I think, in Eco's tremendous little book about writing The Name of the Rose - about the annoying habit people have of asking whether you've read all the books in your library, to which Yambo replies: "Not one, why else would I be keeping them here?").
In his non-fiction Eco tends to be rather skittish and excitable, but in his fiction he has a tendency to go entirely the other way and become rather mannerly and donnish. Thus, it turns out that before his accident Yambo was a collector of quotations about fog, which he obligingly reels off - Dante, Dickens, Emily Dickinson, Pirandello, Flaubert, Vittorio Sereni - and then helpfully points out their symbolic significance. "You know quotations are my only fog lights?" Ah yes, Yambo, indeed we do.
At the heart of the book is clearly a claim about what it means to be human, what it means for our selves to be created and shaped through contact with literature and with art. A novelist's defence of humanism, however, really requires a defence of actual humans, and the book is most convincing in its many arguments when demonstrating rather than merely discussing them. What we look for in a book is exactly what Yambo describes, "the gamut of mysterious flames, mild tachycardias, and sudden flushes that many of those readings gave rise to for a brief instant, which dissolved as quickly as they had come, making way for new waves of heat". Big flame, little heat.
· Ian Sansom's novel Ring Road is published by Harper Perennial
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