Foucault's Pendulum is, like The Name of The Rose (1981), an intellectual thriller laden with an incredible variety of references, ranging from African mythology to medieval history, from Walt Disney to the KGB. And like its fictional predecessor, Foucault's Pendulum examines the nature of and need for faith. The novel chronicles two decades in which the narrator Casaubon investigates secret societies beginning with the medieval Knights Templar and the possible existence of "a Plan, a Universal Plot" for control over the enormous powers of the earth. What begins as a detached scholarly study at the University of Milan in the late 1960s becomes an obsession that some twenty years later not only dominates Casaubon's life but threatens his very existence and claims the lives of two of his friends and colleagues.

While a student, Casaubon happens to meet an editor at Garamond Press, Jacopo...