In The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco – in what some might consider an act oflèse majesté towards his literary hero, Jorge Luis Borges – gave his murderous blind librarian the name of Juan de Burgos. Literary ghosts have a habit of coming back to haunt the writers who have conjured them on to the page, and the spirit of Borges hovers over Eco’s latest novel – the spirit, but not the letter. Eco has found inspiration, once again, in Borges’s literary inventions, but this time the result is disappointing.
Eco’s unacknowledged starting point is the underlying idea in the short story “Pierre Menard, Author of Quixote”, Borges’s celebrated spoof of poetic truth. “History, mother of truth: the idea is astounding,” writes Borges, tongue-in-cheek. “Historical truth, for Menard, is not what has happened; it is what we deem to have happened.” What we deem to have happened, Eco answers, in the same ironic tone, is what the newspapers tell us has happened. To illustrate his point, Eco builds his plot around the creation of a paper in which news is made up from factual titbits, then fed to an audience of common readers willing to believe all sorts of outlandish scenarios and wild conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, what could have been an entertaining satire of the historian-journalist’s construction of reality becomes a cluttered catalogue of improbable hypotheses and more or less amusing what-ifs, mixed up with the story of a vaguely romantic entanglement between two fumbling reporters.
In order to blackmail a businessman, a con artist decides to create a newspaper financed by that businessman, which, under the appearance of investigative journalism, will invent stories that allude to shady events the businessman won’t want to be made public. “Everything always fits with everything else,” says one of the characters. “You just have to know how to read the coffee grounds.”
The narrator, a sometime translator from German and a ghost-writer of detective stories, is appointed as the chronicler of the newspaper’s creation and foreseen demise. The newspaper is to be published in a series of 12 issues numbered 01 to 012. The plan is that the businessman, who will be shown these issues before anyone else, will realise the danger the pseudo-investigative articles represent for him and his friends, pay the con artist handsomely and put an end to the fictional enterprise. If historical truth can be created, Eco suggests, it can also be conveniently erased. However, as the narrator finds out, convincing fictions can end up spilling into reality, and he himself becomes the victim of what is – perhaps – a real and bloodthirsty conspiracy. Numero Zero has been brilliantly translated into English by Richard Dixon, who has been able to catch the changes of voice and tone of the characters, and find English equivalents for the Italian jokes and wordplay.
For some time now, Eco – inventive novelist, meticulous reader, clever theorist of language and cultural phenomena – has been deeply interested in the popular delusions behind all kinds of conspiracy theories, from those involving theKnights Templar in Foucault’s Pendulum to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion inThe Prague Cemetery. But passions, especially literary ones, can eventually become overwhelming, and in Numero Zero, instead of giving his readers judicious measures of his research into society’s paranoias, Eco fills page after page with seemingly endless lists of divergent historical fantasies. The longest and most complicated one proposes, in excruciating detail, an alternative ending to the fascist reign of Mussolini, an Italian equivalent to the idea that Elvis is alive. Compiling lists is one of the earliest devices of poetic fiction, but it must be justified by the context and not feel as if the author were merely indulging himself.
Telling the story of what might have happened, offering alternatives to accepted historical narratives, can be one of the delights of literary invention, from Malory’s La Morte d’Arthur to Life of Brian and Pierre Menard. Numero Zero does not belong to this rewardingly mendacious brotherhood.
• Alberto Manguel’s Curiosity is published by Yale. To order Numero Zero for £12.99 (RRP £16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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