I like this book, which is the first in the Illuminatus! trilogy. For some reason, however, after reading it, my interest for the trilogy dies. This has happened twice in the space of 10 years... This is not to say that it is uninteresting or not a worthwhile read. What I think it means is that although the subject matter is a lot of fun for me (otherwise I wouldn't have tried to read the trilogy a second time), the style gets to me after a while.
The story is centered around the bombing of a magazine devoted to the discussions of various delirious and paranoid conspiracy theories. As the investigators study the disappearance of the owner of the controversial rag, a series of memos on the Illuminati, a secret society that purportedly aims to control the world, is uncovered and scrutinized. As this is happening, the narrative jumps around, and perhaps too much so for me. Paragraphs in different plot lines are presented in rapid succession making it hard for the reader to concentrate on any of them. It may well have been the authors' intent to lay out all the pseudo-facts (?) in this scattered manner to give the reader the sense of loss which would result from the contemplation of all those possibilities.
Other than being a bit hard to read for the lack of a sense of direct continuity (sometimes a linear plot goes a long way to keep the readers' interest), this is a funny book which is fun to read. The conspiracies go from JFK's assassination, to Dillinger's mystical powers, to George Washington vs. Adam Weishaupt, the arcane symbols in the one-dollar bill and well beyond. Perhaps some day soon I'll come back to read the two remaining books, but I needed a break to read something that I could sense was clearly going somewhere. I insist in saying that no other book about conspiracy theories can ever hope to be better than Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum", which is on my bookshelf begging for a third read.
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