Conspiracy 101
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In the first 100 pages you ll wonder why o' why are you reading this rubbish..
After 300 pages you ll will be amazed in an "No way!" fashion...
By the end, you will wish for more....
A supreme mixture of Lovecraft's mythology, elephant & non-sequitur jokes, kinky sex and mind blowing secrets. Amazing.
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What is this about?!!
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I tried and I tried, but I tired and I tired. 100 page or so into it, and it was no good. Complete gibberish. The author tries far too hard to be zany and different. Monty Python meets surrealism on acid. It is one of the very few books I have not finished, nor ever intend to.
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Complicated, challenging, but not actually very good
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I first read Illuminatus back in the early 90s after it was constantly referenced by the band The KLF (also known as the Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu... etc.). Like the reviewer DayTripper, at the time it went totally over my head and I got to the end of it without being really able to say what the book was about.
Now in 2008 I've gone back to give it another crack, to see if nearly two decades later it makes more sense. Now, I understand what it is about, I understand the conspiracy theory context that it sits within and in some ways creates, the interesting way that it tries to wind its narrative around real-life events like Kennedy's assassination, and I understand what the jumpy and quite 'post-modern' narrative approach is. Somehow I didn't spot first time round that this book is, first and foremost, a comedy.
However (and this is a big HOWEVER), despite 'getting it' this time, I'm afraid to say that it now reads as... rubbish. It is simply way too long, it loses its way at several points, its deliberate attempts to confuse the reader are sometimes childish rather than challenging, and the 'special twist' about 50 pages from the end is now very dated and obvious. I wouldn't recommend it.
The 'eye in the pyramid' Illuminati theory is popular in Hollywood at the minute, thanks to films like National Treasure and The Number 23, but if I were as much of a genuine conspiracy theorist as some of the other reviewers seem to be, then I would see this book not as 'the truth' but as a bizarre smokescreen to give conspiracy nuts something to bite their own tails with while the real conspiracy goes unnoticed. If there is a global conspiracy, the numbers 23 and a talking dolphin called Howard do not feature prominently...
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Very entertaining
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I'm not too sure why it took me so long to get around to reading this, but as all the other reviews here will testify its great fun and pulls together conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory, revealing the secrets then a few chapters later turning them on their head! The only thing I will say is that the hippy attitudes in it are a little out of date - people meet up, a beautiful girl comes from out the back to have (unprotected) sex with our protagonist, then they all sit around smoking dope and chatting!
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Delightfully chaotic
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Whether you're an amateur conspiracy theorist, a dischordian, have an interest in the esoteric or just enjoy satyrical fiction, you will love this book. It's a hefty brick of a book, but don't be put off by its enormity; it is very compelling and time flies past while you're reading it.
This book, set "in and out of time and space" (as stated by the blurb) along several different timelines simultaneously, is a wonderful fictional exploration of just about every conspiracy up until the time the book was written surrounding the Masons, the Illuminati and whoever else might really be pulling the strings behind the scenes in the world of international politics, and by what means, and those who oppose them. It's brilliantly funny, challenging and thought provoking. Even if you take it all with a pinch of salt, it's a poignant and well constructed metaphor for the way power works.
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