Cordian! Cordian Druid!

[triadruid]

So I finally finished The Illuminatus! Trilogy last night (technically, I finished the book proper Saturday night, but hadn't worked through the Appendices). Since this was started on recommendation of featherynscale, I can safely say we were both disappointed: I didn't throw it across the room in the first 50 pages like she expected, but neither did I find it to have the impact I was expecting/hoping for from a novel of such cult status. So I began to wonder why I was unimpressed in either direction. I'm not really trying to start any fights (I think I've done enough of that for today), but this is as much musing out loud as it is the start of a discussion:

• First off, I don't usually read books on suggestion. I tend not to necessarily agree with the end result, and I'm going to trust that featherynscale (and kittenpants, and zylch, and all the others who recommended it after her) will understand that this all comes from a difference of opinion, not a value judgement.


• I didn't want to throw the book after 50 pages; that took more like 250, when I was slightly into the second book. By that point I'd already decided it was going to be a meta-referential story where the characters are aware of their literary existence, and I wasn't disappointed (in that sense) in the end. I was proud of myself though for not peeking at the last page, which is often a bad habit of mine when I'm confronted with fluff, and yet can't put the book down.


• I hate not finishing books; there's really only been one author that I can't finish, and that is Donald M. Kingsbury. I was first exposed to him via The Moon Goddess and the Son, which is an awful Cold War-era sci-fi book with one redeeming feature: it introduced me to games theory. That one took about 9 months to finish though, because I chucked it back at the library with as much force as I could manage when I first attempted it back in 1995 or so. About a year later I picked it back up and suffered through the rest, which gave me more information about games theory but no other redeeming features. Problems with it? Dated material, incoherent storyline, and one-dimensional characters. Earlier this year I started Psycohistorical Crisis, unaware that it was by the same author (that's how thoroughly I'd blocked out the earlier travesty), until I got disgusted with it and put it down. Something made me wonder if this was his first novel, and I Googled the name...uh oh! So that explained that. I have no intention of ever finishing that one, even though we own it.


• That last point may seem like a rambling aside, but it feeds into one of my problems with Illuminatus!; the storyline makes no sense. Yes, I understand it's supposed to be non-linear and based more in the mythical realities of the characters than the objective reality. In the end, though, we are told who the narrator is, and let's just say subjective reality isn't really in it. It's not the rambling non-linearity of the storyline that irks me; it's the fact that it doesn't hang together in the end. Why is Hagbard allowed to be what he really is? Where does he actually get his resources from? What does Leviathan have to do with anything that came previously? There's 17 different theories presented and none of them hang with the rest of it, unless you're on acid, apparently.


• Then there's the 'realistic-fiction' angle that upsets me: I tend not to like novels that are set in the 'real world' if they're going to mess with the basic motivational structure of the world to suit the storyline. Illuminatus! is a good example of this, but so is Sheri Tepper, for example. Both modify basic human behavior (sheep in the one, misogyny and feminine purity in the other) to suit their storylines. A brief example: If the Illuminatus (as in the Saures) are so powerful, then the Discordian/Erisian groups should never have been able to manage what they did. Of course, they're not by the points made in the end of the book, so they and most of the other people are just sheep of different colors... which is not quite so true as all of that. But without it, the series falls apart.


• More of the same: Dated material bugs the ever-loving hell out of me. RAW may be a fricking genius, but he bases a lot of Illuminatus! on bogus theories. The Minoans were a goddess-worshipping egalitarian proto-society? Robert Graves unlocked the secret to the ancient matriarchies? The Egyptian myth cycles cited were flawed as well but I can't recall the specific instances now. By relying so 'heavily' (which I still can't quite believe, based on how disconnected most of the rest of the series is from 'reality') on ancient truths, then when those truths fall apart, so does your basis for your theories.

There; I don't expect it'll make much sense to anyone but myself, but I did give it a fair shot. And I do have one plus to all of this: I suspect I'm going to have to reread Ishmael by Daniel Quinn again to see what makes that hang together differently, since essentially the two stories have similar histories. Maybe it won't, after all.

Comments

[capriciouslass.livejournal.com]

I'd have to agree with you on giving up on books; I hate just giving up in the middle. Usually I want to know what happens.
I can think of 3 off the top of my head that I've just plain given up on: The Silmarillion (can't read it if you can't manage to stay awake), Lancelot Du Lethe (the title is better than the book was), and the aforementioned Illuminatus! (I just couldn't get it to make sense).