The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco – review

"Maybe only cheap fiction gives us the measure of reality," says a character in Umberto Eco's 1988 novel Foucault's Pendulum. "Proust was right," he argues: "life is better represented by bad music than by a Missa Solemnis." The dime novel "shows the world as it actually is – or at least the world as it will become." Eco's new book tells the story of the notorious antisemitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion – an episode in which cheap fiction reordered the world in its own image.

The Protocols, which emerged in Russia in the early 1900s, purport to describe a meeting in Prague some years earlier, at which Jewish leaders discuss their plans for world domination. In the words of the late, great Norman Cohn, it is a document in which "the remnants of ancient demonological terrors are blended with anxieties and resentments that are typically modern": the elders assemble, creepily, in the Jewish cemetery at night, but then plan to take total control of the banks, the stock markets, the medical profession and the press, while discussing topical issues such as interest rate mechanisms. Thought to have been concocted on the orders of Peter Rachovksy, a tsarist secret agent, it is a clumsy tissue of plagiarisms, and plagiarisms of plagiarisms, filled with stereotypes nicked from sensational fiction ("Ours is an ambition that knows no limits, a voracious greed, a desire for ruthless revenge, an intense hatred," declare the elders). But it was horrifically effective. It was used to incite pogroms during the Russian civil war; afterwards, it was taken westwards by White Russians, and bolstered the view of the revolution as a Jewish plot. When Hitler came to power it was adopted as a standard piece of Nazi propaganda; it became, in the phrase that Cohn used as the title for his excellent book on the subject, "a warrant for genocide".

The Judaeo-Masonic conspiracy theory is usually traced back to Abbé Barruel, a French Jesuit who argued that the French revolution was the culmination of a clandestine intrigue dating back centuries, involving the Freemasons, the Bavarian Illuminati, the Templars and so on. In 1806 Barruel received a letter from a certain Captain Simonini, apparently an Italian army officer, who congratulated him on exposing these "hellish sects", but argued that he had left out the most hellish of all: the Jews, who had founded and/or infiltrated all the others. The letter was eventually published, and thereafter the Jews played a starring role in conspiratorial fantasies.

The antihero of Eco's new novel is Simone Simonini, the fictional grandson of the letter-writer, who grows up in the shadow of his grandfather's hatreds: "And when I was old enough to understand, he reminded me that the Jew, as well as being as vain as a Spaniard, ignorant as a Croat, greedy as a Levantine, ungrateful as a Maltese, insolent as a gypsy, dirty as an Englishman, unctuous as a Kalmuck, imperious as a Prussian and as slanderous as anyone from Asti, is adulterous through uncontrollable lust …" Simonini is a fraud, an agent provocateur, a murderer, a pervert and a glutton. He grows up in Turin, in an Italy on the verge of unification. Having been disinherited by an unscrupulous notary, he finds work as a forger of legal documents and then as a spy. He is sent to Sicily with Garibaldi's army, then to Paris, working first for the Piedmontese secret service, then the French, then finally the Russians. All the while he collects material for what will be his masterpiece, continuing his grandfather's great work …

A scholar of medieval aesthetics turned professor of semiotics, Eco has forged a highly successful career as a novelist by combining esoteric interests with mass-market storylines: detective stories, conspiracy thrillers, tales of castaways and amnesiacs. He made his name with his first novel, The Name of the Rose, about a series of murders in a late-medieval monastery. Later made into an entertaining film with Sean Connery, it is said to have sold 50m copies worldwide. This was followed by Foucault's Pendulum, in which three Milanese publishers amuse themselves by concocting the conspiracy theory to end all conspiracy theories, only to find that people not only start to believe it, but are willing to kill for it. Eco is at least partly responsible for the recent fashion for mysteries featuring arcane knowledge and ritual slaughter: twinkly postmodernist that he is, he likes to claim that Dan Brown is a character that he invented.

The Prague Cemetery, which has already sold a million copies in Europe and South America, is billed as a return to form after three rather disappointing novels. It takes place in familiar territory: Eco likes the story of the Protocols so much he has told it at least three times before, in Foucault's Pendulum, and two of his essays. Once again, he includes a great deal of eclectic learning, organised (to a greater or lesser extent) around a potboiler plot. In this case, the presiding spirit is the feuilleton serials of Alexandre Dumas and Eugene Sue, complete with printed illustrations. At the beginning of the novel, set in Paris in 1897, a troubled Simonini is writing a memoir on the advice of a certain Austrian Jew he has met. He has blanks in his memory; he wears a fake moustache and beard, for reasons that are not altogether clear to him; he has found a secret passage at the back of his house, leading to an apartment occupied by a certain Abbé Dalla Piccola, who is never in the same place as he is. Might this mysterious abbé possibly be the same person as Simonini? Could our hero be suffering – in the best traditions of low fiction – from a bad case of dissociative personality disorder?

In outline, Simonini's story sounds fun: he cheats, betrays and murders his way through the Risorgimento, the Franco-Prussian war, the Paris Commune and the Dreyfus affair, playing an inglorious behind-the-scenes role in various crucial events, rather like George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman. Almost all the characters are real-life figures, and the historical background is fascinating. On his travels, Simonini meets the rogue's gallery of crooks and fanatics who contributed to the Protocols: the fraudulent Prussian postal worker Hermann Goedsche, the Serb fantasist Osman Bey. He conspires with secret policemen and Jesuits against the Masons, and then with the Masons against the Jesuits; he mixes with Satanists and takes part in an exceptionally lurid black mass.

In practice, though, The Prague Cemetery is a tiring plod. Eco is much indebted to Jorge Luis Borges, and this is the sort of exercise – a fictional version of a true story of a fake which had a powerful effect on the real world – that the Argentine writer would have turned into a dizzying, flawlessly executed five-page short story. But over Eco's flaccid 400-plus pages, it is frustrating and unsatisfactory. All the vices of the historical novel are there: the wodges of researched material; the easy, silly ironies (that Austrian Jew turns out to be a certain "Dr Froide"). The characters are little more than vessels for the author's erudition. What John Updike called Eco's "orgy of citation and paraphrase" often becomes unbearable. His desire to cover pages with occult lore is unabated ("Secretary of the Savonarola Lodge in Florence, Venerable of the Giordano Bruno Lodge of Palmi, Sovereign Grand Inspector-General, thirty-third degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish rite …", and so on and on). For all the homage paid to Dumas, the plot is stodgy and repetitive. It is hard, at times, to remember which blandly threatening puppetmaster or sinister Jesuit we are dealing with.

The novel also leaves a slightly unpleasant taste in the mouth. Eco is basically a playful writer: even his best novels are little more than brilliant mechanical toys. Here, the mood of historical pastiche and learned joke comes up uncomfortably against the history of European antisemitism. The many excerpts of hate literature ("After the crocodile, the Jew is the most musical of all animals") and the reprinted antisemitic caricatures exert a grim fascination, but they leave the reader feeling queasy. The story of the Protocols is, in the end, a sombre one, and Eco's treatment of it feels tactlessly crude and silly: towards the end, the repeated, portentous use of the phrase "the final solution" seems entirely unearned. There are many subjects, after all, which remain well beyond the reach of cheap fiction.