Bite-Sized Book Thoughts (The Fall of Númenor, Back Book 3, and Masks of the Illuminati)

Sometimes I’ll read a book and have a thing or two to say about it on here, but not enough that I think it merits a full article, so here’s the first entrance in my Bite-Sized Book Thoughts – a book-themed update of the old Ferretnibbles concept from the Ferretbrain days.

This time around, I’m going to look at three pieces which are either direct sequels to stuff or further entries in their overall settings – where, as such, I don’t have loads to say about them which wouldn’t be redundant with what I said about related works in their respective series.

The Fall of Númenor (J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Brian Sibley)

This is essentially doing for the Second Age of Middle-Earth what The Children of Húrin, Beren and Lúthien, and The Fall of Gondolin did for the major legends of the First Age – bringing together as much as possible of the material Tolkien cooked up on the subject, arranging it in a sensible order, and releasing it as a “new” Tolkien book. With Christopher Tolkien having sailed to Valinor, for this volume the editorial burden is taken up by Brian Sibley, who was responsible for the 1981 BBC Radio dramatisation of The Lord of the Rings – for my money the best adaptation of the story extant.

This is an apt choice; between his hand in the radio drama and his authoring the official making-of books for Peter Jackson’s Middle-Earth movies, Sibley has a wealth of experience in the problem of adapting Tolkien, which inherently involves a certain amount of editing Tolkien, which is the task he is faced with here. He wisely decides to follow the chronology in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings; the book is essentially a massively adapted version of that, with additional information from The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-Earth, The Nature of Middle-Earth, and Tolkien’s letters and whatnot parachuted in to expand on the entries there.

Whereas I didn’t like The History of Middle-Earth and The Nature of Middle-Earth, because to an extent they’re as much a compilation of ideas that Tolkien toyed with and then rejected as it is a collection of ideas he added to his worldbuilding but never saw light of day in his published work, I did like Christopher Tolkien’s various expansions on the First Age legends, because they saw him doing the additional legwork of taking all that material and presenting it in a much more focused fashion. This does more or less the same trick, and is able to cover a much greater span of time than any of those volumes because the Second Age is the one that Tolkien developed the least.

As a consequence of Tolkien not really writing any stories set in that time (there’s one fairly developed story of the tempestuous marriage of a Númenorean prince and a woman who does not understand his urge for exploration), this is more backstory than it is a satisfying story in its own right. This will mostly be of interest for use as a worldbuilding reference, looking up Second Age-relevant information – say, if you’re writing fanfic, running a Middle-Earth-based RPG like The One Ring, or are trying to figure out where Amazon have deviated from canon in The Rings of Power. (Answer: everywhere.)

Back Book 3 (K.C. Green and Andrew Clark)

I covered the first two volumes of this graphic novel back when I wrote about the Kickstarter for Book 2. This volume is about as long as both the previous ones put together, but the plot here has become sufficiently un-episodic that it makes sense to burn through it all in one go. The most interesting thing I have to note here is that the production of the book wasn’t crowded through Kickstarter but TopatoGO! – the TopatoCo own-brand crowdfunding platform. This is an interesting development and might make sense for projects likely to use the TopatoCo umbrella for distribution and the like, and may also be a symptom of growing mistrust of Kickstarter due to stuff like their investment in blockchain technologies of dubious utility.

In terms of the action here, this rounds out the series, sees the final revelation of the nature of the strange world that Abigail the gunslinger and Daniel the druid live on, exposes the plans of the witches manipulating King Dang, and brings everything to a satisfying resolution. This whole arc dragged a little bit when I read it on release, because it suffered from the curse of webcomic pacing where you don’t really get much more than a few pages a week, and that’s if you’re very lucky and the artist can work very quickly and update very reliably; it works substantially better read all at once, so I’m glad to get the collection. (The whole sequence is online, but it’s nice to have insurance against it disappearing in the future.)

Masks of the Illuminati (Robert Anton Wilson)

In the days immediately prior to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand kicking off World War I, Sir John Babcock comes to Zürich in a state of high agitation, believing himself to be hounded across Europe by a diabolical conspiracy. Through sheer coincidence, he encounters Albert Einstein and James Joyce – two notable thinkers of their age who happen to both be in town – and regales them with his story. Is he merely highly paranoid, or could it be that he has stumbled across a vast occult conspiracy directed by none less than the wickedest man in the world, one Aleister Crowley?

Published in 1981, Robert Anton Wilson’s Masks of the Illuminati came out hot on the heels of his Schrödinger’s Cat trilogy, in which Wilson dialled the most irritating aspects of his writing up to 11 in order to make much the same points as he did in the Illuminatus! trilogy, only in a more meandering structure with more filler which has dated worse. Since the Illuminatus! trilogy has a highly meandering structure, perhaps a bit of filler, and hasn’t dated brilliantly, that’s saying a lot.

Nonetheless, I actually think Masks of the Illuminati is pretty good. Sure, Wilson’s usual writing quirks are still there, but unexpectedly, out of nowhere, he suddenly learns something resembling narrative discipline, and he ensures his use of his various recurring schticks are actually appropriate to the job at had. For instance, yet again he’s back to mimicing James Joyce at points, but this is generally pulled out for sections written from Joyce’s point of view, so the Joyce-isms are justified by the premise.

(One might argue that that’s also true in Schrödinger’s Cat, since that’s a slice-of-life book without any conventional plot which is consciously borrowing from Ulysses, famously a slice-of-life book without any conventional plot, but in that context it doesn’t stick the landing because it’s also trying to do a dozen other things in a fairly disorganised fashion.)

More broadly, the whole arc of the novel is about an initiatory experience in which Babcock’s worldview is forcibly leapfrogged from a somewhat stuffy and old-fashioned Victorian mindset into a more postmodern outlook – so Wilson’s occasional drifts into experimentalism, his comedic asides, the sections of the book written as scripts (some including cinematic-style notes on shots), the obligatory hallucinatory trip at the end (likely induced by mescaline rather than LSD, but other than that a good old-fashioned Wilson standby), and all the rest are kind of apt in that sense.

In particular, such anachronistically experimental notes end up being a neat device for nudging the reader and reminding them that, despite appearances to the contrary, this is not a straight-up horror novel in the style of Arthur Machen, Robert Chambers, or Lovecraft (not credited in the text, obviously, but an entire strand of the story is a nicely-done riff on The Whisperer In Darkness) with a plot from straight out of Dennis Wheatley; that’s merely the subjective experience of Sir John, who has a worldview which reverts to that sort of thing when under stress.

In addition, whereas Schrödinger’s Cat had Wilson attempt address a large number of subjects in a fairly disorganised way, with the result that he touches on a lot of them in a fairly oversimplified manner, Masks sees him be a bit more careful about setting the boundaries of his narrative. Sure, there’s all sorts of nods to Schrödinger’s Cat and Illuminatus! scattered through the thing, with various characters here conceivably being ancestors or alternate versions of characters from those series, and there’s implications about deeper linkages and the possibility that World War I might have been the result of Illuminati machinations, but those are sideshows, and Wilson makes sure not to get bogged down in them. His story here is the psychological liberation of Sir John Babcock, and he focuses on that.

Wilson actually focusing on something is a novelty, but in this instance it pans out surprisingly well. The entire story spins a yarn about Crowley which, though fictional in its particulars, shows a fairly deep knowledge of Crowley’s life and philosophy and a fair amount of research; Wilson’s erudition on the subject is especially impressive when you remember he was writing at a time before some of the better biographies of Crowley were extant.

Indeed, it is possible to interpret the novel in an entirely sceptical manner – regarding any claims about the Golden Dawn (and therefore Crowley’s A.’.A.’., his Golden Dawn splinter group) having a sort of apostolic succession dating back to the Knights Templar and beyond as spurious and regarding the entire thrust of the novel as psychological, and not magical, and for the book to still tell a story with a satisfying narrative arc. Equally, you can read all sorts of additional stuff into it should you wish. Squaring that particular circle is difficult, and it’s impressive how well Wilson does it. Although Illuminatus! would forever be Wilson’s major claim to fame, Masks of the Illuminati is possibly a better novel if you are after something that resembles an actual novel, rather than a bullshit session between two stoned philosophical autodidacts.

Schrödinger’s Litter

When I did my review of the Illuminatus! trilogy, I mentioned that it was the high-water mark of Shea and Wilson’s respective careers, at least in terms of critical recognition. Robert Shea was significantly less prolific as an author going forwards; Robert Anton Wilson was, but he’d always be billed as the guy who co-wrote Illuminatus! and nothing would really end up displacing that.

Not that he didn’t give it a level try. Schrödinger’s Cat is a triptych of novels which offer Wilson’s panoramic view of the late-1970s zeitgeist, much as Illuminatus! captured the spirit of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The schtick is that each book centres around a different interpretation of quantum mechanics – so the first book, The Universe Next Door, unfolds over a cluster of parallel universes, the second (The Trick Top Hat) explores the idea of non-locality and the third (The Homing Pigeons) tackles the difficult question of the role of the conscious observer in collapsing the wavefunction.

This is a clever trick, and Wilson is so impressed with how clever it is that he neglects to give the trilogy much in the way of a substantive central plot. Oh, sure, some ongoing stories do happen and develop, but they aren’t really the point – the point is more that we are following these characters around and observing their little lives and their bullshitty little conversations with each other and whatnot.

You can make an artistically compelling novel out of people doing nothing in particular beyond depicting people living their little lives in the shadow of greater events, mind. James Joyce did it with Ulysses, as Wilson will allude to. Frequently. As he alludes to all of his other pet subjects, more or less all of which he also leaned on heavily in Illuminatus! – and all too often, he doesn’t really have all that much to say about them there which he didn’t handle with a little more flair over there.

Ready Illuminatus One

It’s a busy April somewhere in the 1970s. Just off the coast of west Africa, a coup sees the island of Fernando Poo become the biggest Cold War flashpoint since the Cuban Missile Crisis. In Las Vegas, a biowarfare scientist’s erratic behaviour might compromise the security of the supervirus Anthrax Leprosy Pi. In Ingolstadt, a music festival that would make Woodstock look like a church picnic is set to raise the psychic energy necessary to enact a monstrous plan. In Atlantis, Howard the dolphin has spotted nefarious activities he’ll need his human allies to deal with. In the face of both the overt international crisis and the more esoteric matters bubbling under the surface, the bombing of the New York offices of Confrontation, a radical left-wing journal, and the disappearance of its editor Joe Malik would seem to be a minor matter. But hardened detectives Saul Goodman and Barney Muldoon discover in the wreckage a stash of memos on Malik’s “Illuminati project” – the product of research into the legendary global conspiracy of the same name.

It sounds too weird to be true – but Confrontation journalist George Dorn has been busted in Mad Dog, Texas by a sheriff who seems to have some decidedly Illuminated decorations in a back room at the local jailhouse, and then sprung from jail by a cadre of free market radicals. Whisked away to a golden submarine and introduced to international seafarer, ace attorney, and mystical leader Hagbard Celine, Dorn is about to discover that the Illuminati are all too real, and that their hidden hand is behind all of the above cosmological crises and more as they seek to Immanentize the Eschaton – or, to get away from the theological language, bring about the end of the world as we know it…

The Illuminatus! Trilogy was originally published in three volumes – The Eye In the Pyramid, The Golden Apple, and Leviathan – but was conceived by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea as a single book, and indeed is more generally available these days in omnibus editions collecting all three books than as separate volumes. Between this and the fairly extensive appendices, there’s a certain conscious riffing on the structure of The Lord of the Rings going on – along with innumerable other nods to other pop culture and counterculture touchstones. In constructing the novel Shea and Wilson touch on music, numerous strands of occultism and New Age thinking (with major doses of Crowley and Discordianism a key part of the curriculum), flavours of libertarianism ranging from Objectivism to Michael Moorcock-esque left-libertarianism, pulp sword and sorcery versions of the history of humanity, horny on main sexual fantasies, references to literary inspirations ranging from William Burroughs to James Joyce, and so on and so forth ad nauseum.

All this is to add window dressing to what is ultimately a fairly thin main plot which, without the conspiracy theorising and the mysticism and the libertarian politics, could have been happily addressed in some 300 pages or so, rather than the cumbersome 800+ pages the trilogy actually weighs in at. However, a tight conspiracy thriller this is not: it’s more of a stoned countercultural morass of parodies which are slightly too on the nose, in-jokes which are milked entirely too often to stay funny, rambling conversations which come across as little more than student common room bullshit sessions given some conspiratorial bling, and a dense thicket of references.

A History Infected By Its Own Subject

Neal Wilgus’ The Illuminoids: Secret Societies and Political Paranoia had its moment in the sun some 40 years ago – initially released in 1978, it last got reprinted in 1980 and from there so far as I can tell it dropped off the face of the Earth. It was enthusiastically promoted by Robert Anton Wilson – who, on the strength of the Illuminatus! trilogy he co-wrote with Robert Shea and an interminable number of spin-offs yielding ever-diminishing returns, had become the post-hippie counter-culture’s resident Illuminati expert, and who even contributed an introduction to the volume. (Naturally, he hamfisted in a lot of his hippie-libertarian pet themes and too many Discordian in-jokes, because if there’s one thing Wilson was good at it was taking a moderately funny joke and playing it out until it had become utterly risible.)

The book offers a look at the conspiratorial view of history through the lens of the various theories that have swirled over the years around the Bavarian Illuminati, but does not limit itself to this; the “Illuminoids” of the title are Wilgus’ term for various institutions or individuals which, whilst not part of the Bavarian Illuminati themselves, have been alleged to conduct themselves in a similar manner.

Conventional history tells, broadly speaking, the following story about the Bavarian Illuminati: they were organised by Adam Weishaupt in 1776 in (naturally) Bavaria, and were a secret society of freethinkers out to promote rationalism, secularism, gender equality, and various other ideas that both church and state were not so keen on at the time. They expended a lot of energy on various dramatic spats with other secret societies, largely stemming from the Illuminati’s use of entryist tactics to infiltrate Freemasonry and various connected bodies and use them as recruiting pools. (In the process of doing so, they ended up being useful allies to the more rationalist school of Masons, who opposed the more mystical-religious attitudes of the Rosicrucian strand.

Eventually, the combination of this drama, internal friction, and leaks to the authorities led to Charles Theodore, the ruler of Bavaria, including them in a 1785 blanket ban on secret societies, and they were suppressed – with Weishaupt fleeing and the organisation apparently collapsing in a big heap of drama.

JFK Was a Diamond Geezer

JFK is the eternal president of the conspiracy theory community. Whilst conspiracy theories had been rife in American culture before his assassination – much of the entire previous decade had involved much fretting about the global Communist menace on the part of citizens and senators alike – the Kennedy assassination is perhaps the first such event which, thanks in part to the mass media age, almost instantaneously spawned its own subculture that could be described as a 9/11-style truth movement. You didn’t have World War II Truthers, after all… Though I guess the early Christians could be regarded as Crucifixion Truthers.

One of the heretical early gospels of JFK assassination theories is the famed Gemstone File. Supposedly a mass of letters written by the mysterious Bruce Roberts, the Gemstone File came to the public consciousness largely through Mae Brussell’s radio show, Roberts having given Brussell copies of the letters because he thought the conspiracy he’d stumbled on was responsible for killing one of Brussell’s daughters in a car accident.

Brussell was the queen of the conspiracy theorists back in the 1970s, offering a left-wing point of view which seemed all too plausible in the days of COINTELPRO and Watergate. After Brussell’s death, her voluminous papers ended up divided among various parties, and the original Gemstone File dropped out of sight – but as we shall see, a paraphrased summary of its contents circulated at first as mass-photocopied samizdat and eventually as a text file on the early Internet.

Come 1992 and the Gemstone File would become the subject of a book by Jim Keith – maverick conspiracy researcher and all round libertarian counter-culture dude. (He strikes me as the sort of libertarian less prone to Pinochet-inspired helicopter memes and who’s more keen on legalising weed.) Keith himself would become the focus of various conspiracy theories after he died in 1999 after complications arising from knee surgery, Keith having injured himself falling off a stage at Burning Man. (I told you he was a counter-culture dude.) Before that happened, though, he was an ex-Scientologist who, after dropping out of the Church, created the underground zine Dharma Combat, and for a space of time in the 1990s produced some of the most way-out-there conspiracy theory books you could hope for. The Gemstone File was his first book, largely a collection of key Gemstone-related texts and commentary thereon by various hands.