The Illuminatus! Trilogy

I've finished reading The Illuminatus! Trilogy. As far as I can remember this is the first book I have read that reviews itself, through book reviewer "Epicene Wildeblood" (page 238):

It's a dreadfully long monster of a book, Wildeblood says pettishly, and I certainly won't have time to read it, but I'm giving it a thorough skimming. The authors are utterly incompetent—no sense of style or structure at all. It starts out as a detective story, switches to science-fiction, then goes off into the supernatural, and is full of the most detailed information of dozens of ghastly boring subjects. And the time sequence is all out of order in a very pretentious imitation of Faulkner and Joyce. Worst yet, it has the most raunchy sex scenes, thrown in just to make it sell, I'm sure, and the authors—whom I've never heard of—have the supreme bad taste to introduce real political figures into this mishmash and pretend to be exposing a real conspiracy. You can be sure I won't waste time reading such rubbish, but I'll have perfectly devastating review ready for you by tomorrow noon.

OK, that was kind of funny when I read it, but mostly because it's so close to the truth. Fans of this book will tell you to look beyond the bad writing, incoherent plot, and unbelievable characters... that it's some sort of philosophical test disguised as irreverent satire. I won't argue with that. The esoteric humour doesn't do much to entertain me, although I'm sure some readers will think otherwise. The style of writing requires some effort, but the book doesn't really live up to its reputation of being challenging to read.

Sadly, it isn't particularly intellectually stimulating either. If it's supposed to make the reader think for himself it ought to inspire thought, not merely provoke – and despite trying very hard it fails to do even the latter (this may partly be due to the book's age). The authors also push their philosophical and ideological beliefs (some of which I can agree with, none of it profound) so vehemently that the already weak attempts at allegory are shattered. What remains is unusual but fairly uninteresting.

To be honest I read this book mostly because of its influence on popular culture (references to fnords and JAMs might be familiar examples). While it satisfied my curiosity in this respect, The Illuminatus! Trilogy is not likely to open your mind unless it was almost hopelessly closed to begin with, in which case you may not be able to finish reading it.

27 March, 2005