Customer Reviews
Utter Rubbish - By: Stu, 20 Nov 2008 
I wasted 3 days of my well erned holiday on this book before throwing it across the room & declaring it a waste of my life.
If anyone finds it on Ko-Taoin Thailand they're welcome to it.
No ordinary book - By: Beef Wellington, 15 Jul 2008 
It's interesting to note that there are a large number of reviews Amazon reviews for Illuminatus, (over 80 at the present count), & 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 & 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 & elsewhere, about Illuminatus, much of it contradictory & all of it true (and false & 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, & thus nearly forty years old, & for all that it is flawedin many ways, it will afford the willing reader a remarkable journey that will challenge, disorient, inspire, & 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 & 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, & it's likely you'll wonder why you're bothering & 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 - By: Paris E. Papapaschalis, 30 Apr 2008 In the first 100 pages you ll wonder why o' why are you reading this rubbish..
After 300 pages you ll will be amazedin 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 & mind blowing secrets. Amazing.
What is this about?!! - By: D. M. Downes, 26 Mar 2008 I tried & I tried, but I tired & I tired. 100 page or so into it, & it was no good. Complete gibberish. The author tries far too hard to be zany & 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 - By: Mr. Stuart Bruce, 14 Feb 2008 
I first read Illuminatus backin 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 & I got to the end of it without being really able to say what the book was about.
Nowin 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 &in some ways creates, the interesting way that it tries to wind its narrative around real-life events like Kennedy's assassination, & I understand what the jumpy & quite 'post-modern' narrative approach is. Somehow I didn't spot first time round that this book is, first & 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, & the 'special twist' about 50 pages from the end is now very dated & obvious. I wouldn't recommend it.
The 'eyein the pyramid' Illuminati theory is popularin Hollywood at the minute, thanks to films like National Treasure & 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 & a talking dolphin called Howard do not feature prominently...
