Gruel can taste quite good. It tastes like whatever you put in it, and Eco's peppered the plot with all the real herbs of the east and best tasting spices of an imagined orient. It's a novel that asks important questions like: "What if the real holy grail was just this slop bowl we found in my estranged father's hovel? But it's not actually the holy grail, we just need people to believe it to be, except maybe it actually is the real grail because we lied about it and our lies became true."

Honestly though, this novel is quite exquisite. Baudolino employs a framing device set during the Fourth Crusade, when the crusaders, rather than going to Jerusalem, sacked Constantinople. During the chaos, the titular character Baudolino has recently returned from his travels and saves the historian Niketas. The novel is a recounting of his life and travels, a quest for a grail, and avenging regicide.

The first chapter is a manuscript (presented diagetically to Niketas) and Baudolino's first attempt at writing. Included for the readers are his errors, corrections, and the palimpsestic remains of the parchment's previous text. Given in the rustic dialect of Baudolino's youth, it's a geninuinely hilarious and fun introduction the describes how Baudolino as a child helped a wayward Frederick Barbarossa.

Frederick Barbarossa in return sends Baudolino, who has proven to be a language savant and prodigious spinner of politically expedient lies, to Paris to be a student. The first two-thirds of the book detail Baudolino's travels back and forth across Europe and his career concocting fake letters and fake provenances of holy relics. He befriends a retinue of diverse comrades such as Abdul, the Irish Palestinian, who supplies everyone with hallucinogenic green honey from the east. They ultimately come up with a scheme for an expedition that will strike an alliance with the fabled Christian king of the east, Prester John.

Baudolino's roguish retinue accompany Frederick on the Third Crusade. While Frederick is headed to Jerusalem, they'll be continuing on into the depths of Asia to find Prester John. On the way they stop in a fortress in Anatolia and Frederick dies. Baudolino and his fellow picaros believe Frederick is murdered, presumably by one of their own but they can't prove who. They toss him in the river to make it appear he drowned.

Up to this point in the novel, events have been firmly rooted in history, or at least been surrounded with enough specific historical truths to be plausible. As they get farther into the deep stretches of Asia events become more fantastical. They reach Pndapetzim, a land adjacent to Prester John's and ruled by his subordinate, Deacon John. Pndapetzim is filled with mythical beings like blemmyes, monopods, and satyrs.

Did Baudolino really go to the east? A facile interpretation would be that his tales of the far east are simply lies spun to Niketas, perhaps to absolve him of some guilt in the death of Barbarossa. The entire framing device is reminiscent of Rustichello da Pisa writing down his fellow inmate, Marco Polo's account of the east. And historians have argued whether Polo even went to China or just gave second hand testimony.

A more charitable interpretation of this is that these fantastical things are distorted by Baudolino's misunderstanding of what he's seeing: a westerner's orientalist projection onto the unknown. I think this is unlikely as well. While there are some connections to reality such as a mention of ritual sky burials, White Huns, and the relationship between Prester John and Deacon John could be reminiscent of the relationship of the Dalai and Panchen Lamas, the sheer weirdness of all the other items suggests something else is going on.

In the east, Baudolino has a relationship with a female figure from a matriarchal sect similar to those of the Amazons. They're all called "Hypatia" and like their real, historical namesake, subscribe to a gnostic or Neoplatonist metaphysical view. Deacon John is a sort of Demiurge to Prester John, who represents Neoplatonic "the One" or the "form of the Good." There's also a structural accord with the metaphysics in how this is presented by Baudolino to Niketas. The first chapter, is something discrete and particular: a historical document. As the tale gets more fantastical, it becomes more oral. It's almost as if structurally, the narrative is proceeding up the chain of being from matter, through humanity, up towards a realm of imagination and ideas and toward the Demiurge and capital-G Gnostic-God. Even the physical bodies of the fantastical creatures are determined by their heretical beliefs, implying they are creatures existing on a somewhat higher plane.

Overall a fantastic book that had me smiling at all the historical references and ironic statements. The only other work I've read by Eco is The Name of the Rose, which similarly draws the reader into the medieval intellectual milieu and mindset. The Name of the Rose, however, feels like a Sherlock Holmes mystery exquisitely adorned with historical detail. Baudolino has all these trappings but overlaid on a story that's much richer structurally with the ideas it presents, its engagement with history, and the imagination. Genuinely good literature and a cut above his earlier novel.