Just finished Foucalt’s Pendulum. That’s some batshit novel writing there. It was a little long, and I was waiting for the end, but when it finished it hit hard in the heart.
Basically, these three editors for a publishing house take a delve into the occult, and slowly lose control over their boundary between theory and reality, even though it’s plain even to them that their madness is their own invention. As they follow the Templars to the Rosicrucians to the Assassins, they collect all of their “connections” called the Plan, all based off of a piece of paper discovered by a natty old colonel, and able to reshape history in its form. However, one of the editors shows off the secret and gets kidnapped by the theoretical secret society, while another contracts cancer, and the last becomes the narrator of the story.
It’s interesting to see how the editors, logical, haughty, and inscrutable become madmen putting together any coincidence they can find, until all they can see is the Plan, even in the most basic machines. In the cancerous editor’s case, he believes that in re-writing history, his body has learned to re-write itself, killing him in the process. The piece of paper is a merchant’s receipt, but in the eyes of believers, it becomes a treasure map. And even though the truth is obvious, the believers must cling to believing; they are addicted to the search. For the frustrated people who search endlessly, if they find something, they were right all along. The search gives meaning to a meaningless life.
The conclusion that the narrator ends with is that the search for the answer is more important than the answer, and if you were to tell the believers, they wouldn’t believe you. So they invent their own searches for an impossible answer, which proves itself. If the answer were found, it wouldn’t be the right answer. Therefore the search must be true.
So don’t go searching for the impossible, when it’s already in front of you. “I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.”
(But isn’t that what a Templar would say?")