The Prague Cemetery. By Umberto Eco

The Prague Cemetery

Umberto Eco

Translated from Italian by Richard Dixon

Vintage Books. First published in English 2011

'Foucault's Pendulum' by Eco, published in 1989, dealt with a fake conspiracy set up by a group of bored Italian intellectuals to beguile a mediocre but vain poet to pay enormous sums of money to see his work in print. The conspiracy however goes wrong, becomes all too real with disastrous consequences for the perpetrators of the joke. 'The Prague Cemetery' also involves conspiracies, again most of them fake, with the narrator of the stories, one Captain Simonini, being the common thread that holds them together. 

The events occur in Paris and a few other European cities and towns in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries. Simonini is a talented forger. He is not only skilled at copying other's documents, but can also create, ab initio, treatises, letters, books or purported speeches that implicate a wide variety of people, sects, and groupings in many different maleficent acts. He repeatedly uses these talents, always for money - that's the way he makes his living - and is in this way involved in Garibaldi's 'Il Risorgimento' in Italy in 1860, and the Paris commune of 1871, during both which historical events he creates documents that lead to important turns in them. His culminating success is in creating the 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion', which is a document that actually exists and has been used by anti-Semites, including the 'greatest' of them all, Adolph Hitler, to justify their excesses against the Jewish people. Apart from the Jews, Simonini's forgeries also implicate other 'usual suspects', principally Jesuits and Freemasons, in global conspiracies to seize absolute power.           

Simonini has a split personality, and he often becomes Abbe Dalla Piccola, in which character he has adventures in other hermetic spaces. He witnesses spirit possession, flirts with Theosophy, has conversations with Freud and other practitioners of the nascent discipline of psychiatry. The book thus brings together descriptions, ostensibly from the 'inside', of various shady, pseudo-scientific and pseudo-historical practices that were prevalent then, and are prevalent now. The grandfather conspiracy theory of them all, the one about the Knights Templar, finds a passing mention, as does the one about the 'Illuminati', two theories so profitably mined recently by Dan Brown. 

'The Prague Cemetery' is an amusing, well-written, detailed novel that weaves in and around actual historical events, documents and personalities, but claiming its own protagonists as the heroes, the movers and the shakers. It is very like 'Foucault's Pendulum' in the general attitude it bears towards these idiotic but dangerous theories, and like that novel and unlike, for example, Dan Brown's books, always ensures that the reader does not turn a breathless believer of any of them.