It was the mid '90s. I was watching the news. And some local anchor talked about how a man had attempted to board an airplane with a semiotic weapon and I just about fell out of my chair laughing, and then decided that was maybe the best band name I'd ever heard. Now, of course, it's a Tumblr, a Wordpress and a Twitter handle and near as I can tell, none of the above understands semiotics.

I'll bet that's why Dan Brown writes about Professor Langdon, the "symbologist", rather than Professor Langdon, the semioticist. If I say "symbologist" you're likely to figure it's somebody who studies symbols and their meanings, right? But if I say "semioticist" you're likely to figure it's some egghead so far up his own ass that he turns the act of opening a can of cat food into performance art. Near as I can tell, that's an occupational hazard when your field of study is literally the meaning of meaning - when there's a tautology in the title you're kinda fucked from the get-go.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I went into this book having enjoyed the movie and having no real handle on what I was getting myself into. I was expecting "literary murder mystery" - a sort of Cadfael with philosophy. And it's that, kind of the way Godel Escher Bach is about a turtle racing Achilles. I've burned through three or four histories of the renaissance, actually had heard of Waldensians and Cathars prior to reading this, and had seen the movie three times.

And it got really dry for me.

As I listened (did the audiobook), I started to get a nagging feeling that narrative was being sacrificed for capital-M Meaning. This reached a fever pitch in the last quarter of the book, wherein we solve the mystery by applying three or four layers of Meaning to casual things people said while also demonstrating how things would have been solved much sooner if three or four layers of Meaning hadn't been applied to other casual things people said.

You know that scene in Fiddler on the Roof where Tevye says "there IS no other hand!" and acts all decisive and shit? After spending the whole movie arguing with himself?

In The Name of the Rose, Tevye never says "there is no other hand." He just argues with himself and then says "Tradition!"

Lemme put it this way: if you enjoyed the movie, as I did, imagine the novel as if the movie were intercut amongst a 46-hour-long reenactment of the Nicene Council. Your enjoyment of the new movie is heavily dependent on your interest in early Christian canon and how it got to be that way.

Does that make sense?