Baudolino

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The incident of the death of Emperor Frederick, while on the Third Crusade, is a key element of the plot. Discover the Middle Ages with Baudolino - a wondrous, dazzling, beguiling tale of history, myth and invention. The narrative discipline, and the drive, was provided by the Conan Doyle artifice, and the Agatha Christie-like series of consecutive murders.

His story begins in 1155, when Baudolino – a highly talented Italian peasant boy – is sold to and adopted by the emperor Frederick I. In one of the early episodes Baudolino purchases the alleged bodies of the three biblical Magi and then swaps their Eastern clothes for something more in line with the current European fashion to make them seem more 'authentic'.

This delight in character, story, temperament, culture, context and language comes across just as clearly in Baudolino as it did in the earlier book. They meet imaginary beasts and monsters - giants and creatures with eyes in their breasts, one-footed hopping skiapods and beautiful hypatias, half-virgin, half-goat - creatures out of the fantastic voyages of Mandeville, turned solid in this tale. As the men make their way to safety Baudolino begins to recount, with numerous digressions and contradictions, his extraordinary life story.

Nature abhors a vacuum" and things rush into the emptiness of created vacua, both in the flask and in the mind. With the closure of the church in 1803, Baudolino's remains were transferred to the church of Sant'Alessandro and then in 1810 to a chapel dedicated to him in the new cathedral. Sent to Paris to learn "the art of saying well that which may or may not be true" Baudolino fell in with a band of good fellows and fell in love with his stepmother. It turns, like the Christian religion, on questions of paternity and the presence of the divine spirit in matter such as the blood and wine of the Eucharist.He is the patron saint of the nearby city of Alessandria, where his feast is celebrated on the Sunday following 10 November. It is fiction - Eco's, Baudolino's, tall-storytellers' of the ancient world - woven into the history of the fourth crusade.

He's a cunning and imaginitive fabricator of religious mysteries, yes, but he soon discovers that the world is inhabited by liars far more cruel and accomplished than he. Like George MacDonalnd Fraser, Eco looks at history through the skewed eye of a born cheat, liar and charlatan with a gift for languages and an eye for the ladies. It is the life-history of Baudolino, a self-confessed liar, told to the Byzantine historian Niketas Choniates.

You see, Baudolino, an imaginary adopted son of emperor Frederick Barbarossa (who is a real historical figure, by the way), is a bit of a trickster.