Björn recenserade The Illuminatus! Trilogy av Robert Anton Wilson
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3 stjärnor
Perhaps this is the only workable approach to writing a proper conspiracy thriller that is not Foucault's Pendulum: write it from a discordian POV. If everything true is false and vice versa and you cannot believe anything that is written, hail Eris etc, then the whole mishmash of ancient societies, 60s psychedelia, 70s politics, literary allusions and general weirdness not only makes sense, but makes total nonsense, which of course may be the point.
And for the first few hundred pages, I'm loving this. Shea and Wilson dive in and start connecting the dots between everything and anything so gleefully that you can hear them giggling. They throw everything in there, from ancient myths (real or made up on the spot) to modernist and postmodernist authors (Melville! Lovecraft! Joyce! Pynchon! Vonnegut!), to then-current affairs, mixing fact and fiction in an absolutely dizzying way, pulling together threads to show ideas …
Perhaps this is the only workable approach to writing a proper conspiracy thriller that is not Foucault's Pendulum: write it from a discordian POV. If everything true is false and vice versa and you cannot believe anything that is written, hail Eris etc, then the whole mishmash of ancient societies, 60s psychedelia, 70s politics, literary allusions and general weirdness not only makes sense, but makes total nonsense, which of course may be the point.
And for the first few hundred pages, I'm loving this. Shea and Wilson dive in and start connecting the dots between everything and anything so gleefully that you can hear them giggling. They throw everything in there, from ancient myths (real or made up on the spot) to modernist and postmodernist authors (Melville! Lovecraft! Joyce! Pynchon! Vonnegut!), to then-current affairs, mixing fact and fiction in an absolutely dizzying way, pulling together threads to show ideas and concepts shining through, and yanking the rug out from under you anytime you feel like you have a clue what's going on. They even make the weird structure - the POV shifts, the time skips, etc - seem perfectly natural.
But eventually, that's also what makes the book more of a chore to read than a pleasure. At some point, you realise that you're reading page upon page upon page upon page of exposition by characters who are, in-story, either mad, lying, or just plain wrong, and will be proven so in the next 20 pages of exposition by another character (or the same character), who in turn will turn out to be... The joke just goes on too long with no punchline in sight. It's all a bit like... well...
Mike: Rick, you've been looking out of that window for three hours now.
Rick: Yes, well it's hardly surprising, is it? Vyvyan put super glue all over the pane!
Vyvyan: Did I? That was a good joke!
Rick: I'll probably be disfigured for life, Vyvyan, and you'll have to pay! Ha! And then who will be laughing, ha! Not you, matey. That's for sure!
Mike: Yeah, well just don't break the glass when you tear your face off, that's all.
Rick: I won't. I won't because... [quickly moves away from window] it's not true! It was a joke I made up, and you fell for it like the fascists you are!
I'm reading this in 2016 as Complete Idiotism has suddenly become a valid political platform, and it feels oddly prescient, but not necessarily in a good way. I'm wondering where Trump, Gove, Putin, Erdogan, Åkesson et al would fall in the context of this novel. I thought I wanted to laugh at it all, but when bare-faced authoritarianism and ditto irrationalism turn out to get along fine, I don't want enlightenment, I just want to pull a blanket over my head and read something that actually makes sense instead, and doesn't end with the most worn-out cop-out cliché ending in literary history.