nostalgebraist's Reviews > The Illuminatus! Trilogy

(Edit, 8/3/13: finally finished this. Review still stands.)

On p. 650 of 800 but the last 70 are just appendices and I feel like writing a review now, so . . .

I've been reading this very slowly over the course of many months, which I guess is a reflection of how little it has really engaged me. On the other hand, I feel no animosity towards it, and fully intend to finish it eventually. To my taste it is neither especially good nor especially bad; it is just a odd, underwhelming if inoffensive sort of book that seems to have been intended for an audience I do not belong to.

According to Wikipedia, this is how the authors came up with their premise:

The trilogy was originally written between 1969 and 1971 while Wilson and Shea were both associate editors for Playboy magazine. As part of the role, they dealt with correspondence from the general public on the subject of civil liberties, much of which involved paranoid rants about imagined conspiracies. The pair began to write a novel with the premise that "all these nuts are right, and every single conspiracy they complain about really exists".

The trilogy is pretty much what you'd expect to yield from such an idea, or specifically what you'd expect from a work that set out to thoroughly explore that idea at the expense of plot and characters as traditionally conceived. The narrative is a phantasmagoria of crackpot ideas, rarely sticking with one character or idea for more than a few pages. To say that the plot is full of twists would be misleading -- in fact there is not so much a "plot" as an extended, rather monotonous sequence of shifts from one weird worldview to the next. The reader quickly learns not to be surprised when any given perspective on the story begins to break down, so there is little room for these shifts to have anything like the impact of ordinary "plot twists."

Reading the trilogy ultimately feels a lot like surfing the internet in search of information about conspiracy theories. If you've ever done that for fun (and I have), you may find it entertaining. But 800 pages worth of conspiracy surfing is quite a lot. There is a set of recurring characters but none of them are especially well developed -- different segments of the book are told from different characters' perspectives, but often these are barely distinguishable -- and, outside of a few fairly effective scenes of frightening peril, there is very little "human interest" material to sustain one's interest. The prose is mostly flat, unadorned description, with occasional not-very-impressive stream of consciousness episodes. There is plenty of violence, unusual sex, drug use, and far-out ideological talk, but the people who engage in this behavior feel to the 21st century reader like a set of 60s/70s cliches, and the trilogy's attempts to be weird and shocking feel like quaint artifacts of their time, much less truly mind-bending than, say, Joyce (whom Shea and Wilson clearly idolize -- in fact they mock themselves for this in the text).

I get the feeling that Shea and Wilson would agree with me that their characters are cliches. Much of the trilogy is written with a deliberate sense of artifice, as if the authors want their characters to feel like they are outgrowths of ideas -- cliches, conspiracy theories, ideologies -- rather than organic, independent beings. The goal is, I guess, to instill a universal skeptical wariness in the reader, to encourage them to reflexively doubt every element of the story, whether it emerges from conventional wisdom or from the furthest-out fringe. Again, though, 800 pages of this is a lot, especially for readers for whom universal, reflexive wariness is not a new idea. The parts of the trilogy I have most enjoyed are the parts that come closest to ordinary extended fictional narrative -- such as a segment about the history of Atlantis -- and these segments make me wish Shea and Wilson had written something closer to a straight science fiction novel about an elaborate mega-conspiracy, rather than this campy, self-parodic, under-characterized not-quite-a-story, which stretches its gimmick out at great length in the name of some fairly obvious principles of critical thinking. It's not that I have a problem with experimental writing, or with novels that don't have conventional plots, or with works that joke about and undermine each discourse they invoke -- it's just that there are plenty of books that do those things much, much better. When Shea and Wilson bring up their love for Joyce it's hard not to wonder what they think they have to offer that he doesn't.

Nonetheless, this is a pleasant, readable, likable work that occasionally achieves the kind of transcendence-through-zany-bricolage that its authors are striving for. It apparently has a lot of extremely devoted fans, which I don't entirely understand, but I'm not going to question the validity of their enthusiasm. Maybe if I had read it ten years ago -- or had been born thirty years earlier -- Illuminatus! would have blown my mind. As it is, my opinion of it is almost entirely neutral, as if it and I have passed through each other in ghostly fashion without touching or leaving any marks.