Customer Reviews: Read 80 more reviews...
 Utter Rubbish November 20, 2008
I wasted 3 days of my well erned holiday on this book before throwing it across the room and declaring it a waste of my life.
If anyone finds it on Ko-Tao in Thailand they're welcome to it.
 No ordinary book July 15, 2008
It's interesting to note that there are a large number of reviews Amazon reviews for Illuminatus, (over 80 at the present count), and that that not one of these gives a score of 3 stars. (I expect someone will confound me shortly be adding one, but hey-ho.) There's just no middle ground here. Most reviewers love it, but a significant minority loath it and really can't see what all the fuss is about. What's my point? I suppose it's to say that this is something of an extra ordinary book.
Much has been said, here and elsewhere, about Illuminatus, much of it contradictory and all of it true (and false and meaningless). It seems a little futile to try to add to that, other than to say that for all that is a product of it's time, and thus nearly forty years old, and for all that it is flawed in many ways, it will afford the willing reader a remarkable journey that will challenge, disorient, inspire, and stay with them long after they've put it down for the last time. (At which, for maximum effect they should pick up Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati.) True it's era and pedigree, this is the fictional equivalent of a righteous acid trip - 1968 orange sunshine acid obviously.
Finally, a word of advice to those willing to brave this tome: give it at least 100 pages, possibly a little more. The first 100 pages are hard going, and it's likely you'll wonder why you're bothering and what the hell is going on with the style of writing / editing. Seriously, stick with it - it will reward you. Well about 90% of you anyway...
Conspiracy 101 April 30, 2008
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.
What is this about?!! March 26, 2008
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
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.
 Complicated, challenging, but not actually very good February 14, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
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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