Litmus

By Paul Gray

FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM

by Umberto Eco

Translated by William Weaver

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

641 pages; $22.95

A man named Casaubon hides after closing time in a Paris museum called the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers. Nearby, an enormous pendulum swings silently in the gathering darkness, mute testimony, as a 19th century French scientist named Foucault first demonstrated, to the rotation of the earth. Casaubon is here because he suspects something terrible will happen before dawn. If he is correct, then he and two friends, playful inventors of a plot to rule the world, do not have long to live. In their machinations, have he and his coconspirators accidentally stumbled across some dangerous truth? Or, % perhaps worse, have their own words created forces that will try to destroy them?

From this spooky, arresting premise, Umberto Eco has launched a novel that is even more intricate and absorbing than his international best seller The Name of the Rose (1983). Unlike its predecessor, Foucault's Pendulum does not restrict its range of interests to monastic, medieval arcana. This time Eco's framework is vast -- capacious enough to embrace reams of ancient, abstruse writings and a host of contemporary references or allusions. The latter include the Yellow Submarine, Casablanca, Tom and Jerry, Lina Wertmuller, Barbara Cartland, Stephen King, Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Flash Gordon, the Pink Panther, Minnie Mouse and Hellzapoppin. What do all of these things have to do with one another? Eco's teasing answer: maybe everything, maybe nothing at all.

Readers will have to take sides here, or struggle to find a compromise somewhere in the middle ground. For beneath its endlessly diverting surface, Eco's novel constitutes a litmus test for ways of looking at history and the world. Casaubon, the narrator, recalls himself as a younger man, when he was willing to take facts at face value, to be what he calls incredulous. He recognizes and scorns another manner of thinking: "If two things don't fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that's credulity." But then, as a graduate student in Milan, he writes a doctoral thesis on the Knights of the Temple, a medieval order of warrior-monks formed in the 12th century and suppressed by the Pope in the 14th, who have vanished into a spiraling legend. Francis Bacon was a secret Templar, according to some spuriously authoritative sources; so, according to others, were Columbus, Mozart and Hitler.

At first, Casaubon laughs at such lunacies. His merriment is shared by Belbo and Diotallevi, editors at a Milanese publishing house. Given his expertise, Casaubon is hired as a consultant to advise on the endless stream of Templar manuscripts that flood the editorial offices. Eventually, these three scoffers find an amusing way to waste their time. Using Belbo's new word processor, they concoct "the Plan," a plausible scenario revealing a Templar plot to unleash unimaginable powers from the center of the earth in order to rule the world.

Of course, this experiment gets out of hand. Casaubon, no longer incredulous, finds himself questioning all facets of reality, "asking them to tell me not their superficial story but another, deeper story." At this point, the narrator is hooked, as will be anyone who has heeded him thus far. True believers, skeptics, those waffling in between: all are in for a scarifying shock of recognition.