Or like the feeling of watching a really good History Channel documentary which delves deep into secret societies or regimes and then sitting on the remote, causing the channel to change abruptly to Family Guy. 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 mismash and pretend to be exposing a real conspiracy.”Īs to what the Illuminatus! trilogy is really like, imagine your uncle leading you along in an interesting and likely emotionally-drenched story, and then he cracks a joke out of nowhere, at which point you are likely not going to be able to ascertain whether it’s really funny or really messed up. And the time sequence is all out of order in a very pretentious imitation of Faulkner and Joyce. 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. “It’s a dreadfully long monster of a book … The authors are utterly incompetent – no sense of style or structure at all. The authors themselves were kind enough to review their own book on page 238: The trilogy sets out to break the reader’s mind down by stripping away preconceived ideas on each of the above topics and will have your head spinning after the first few pages. The overall feel is like you’re reading a parallel universe of an alternate history book. The humor and blatant non-seriousness of these woven stories leaves the reader with a feeling of not knowing what to believe. But Illuminatus!, at the very least, isn’t hack writing like Dan Brown’s.Ĭould I convince you to read it knowing that you can expect talking dolphin poets fighting off a secret government’s pop star-zombie Nazi army during a Woodstock-type rock festival? Or that it is full of Zen philosophy, Discordian ideals(look it up online), Freudianism, nympho free masons and outright nonsense? It is also chock-full of secret societies, conspiracies, LSD, giant golden submarines and escalating cold war issues. Okay, that also sounds like other books you’ve read. It really is up to the way you interpret it. Or perhaps just back to the eighteenth century. But involved here is a conspiracy that may go back 18,000 years in the past. Yes, this sounds similar to plots from other books you’ve read. Detectives assigned to the case discover that the cause is actually much more confusing than they originally supposed. The editor of the magazine has disappeared without a trace. The offices of a magazine are bombed, supposedly by a militant conservative group of some sort.

The plot of Illuminatus! is difficult to describe, but I’ll try. Reading Time: 3 minutes Photo illustration by Marcus Jones

The illuminatus trilogy review