SOURCE: A review of Foucault's Pendulum, in West Coast Review of Books, Vol. 15, No. 2, November-December, 1989, p. 20.

In the following review, O'Toole praises the plotting and humor of Foucault's Pendulum.

Nearly every form of mysticism and the Occult known to Western man is catalogued in this encyclopedic novel [Foucault's Pendulum], in which the author of The Name of the Rose has woven his immense mastery of these cults and their history into a grand intellectual adventure.

Casaubon, narrator of this odyssey, an editor with a Milan publishing house, is an expert on the Knights Templar, the order that guarded the Temple of Jerusalem during the Crusades before they were tried and disbanded for heresy. He and his co-workers are approached by a Colonel Ardenti, late of the Foreign Legion, who claims to have discovered a secret Templar plan for world domination. Since the Templars have been the subject of...