Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco

A brilliant parody that predicted the much of the hype around the daVinci Code and the digital paranoia of the internet age. This book is Eco's best fiction. Do not be put off by the esoterica and the difficult bits think of it as a film with both a background and a foreground just let the experience carry you along.

The plot (important word) is about three men working in a vanity publishing company who invent a global conspiracy as a joke on their conspiracy obsessed clients. At first it is harmles fun as they rewrite the history of the templars to fit in with a story of their own concoction but as they begin feeding in more connections, characters and historical mumbo jumbo their creation grows beyond their control.

Description from Amazon:

If a copy (often unread) of The Name of the Rose on the coffee table was a badge of intellectual superiority in 1983, Eco's second novel--also an intellectual blockbuster--should prove more accessible. This complex psychological thriller chronicles the development of a literary joke that plunges its perpetrators into deadly peril. The narrator, Casaubon, an expert on the medieval Knights Templars, and two editors working in a branch of a vanity press publishing house in Milan, are told about a purported coded message revealing a secret plan set in motion by the Knights Templars centuries ago when the society was forced underground. As a lark, the three decide to invent a history of the occult tying a variety of phenomena to the mysterious machinations of the Order. Feeding their inspirations into a computer, they become obsessed with their story, dreaming up links between the Templars and just about every occult manifestation throughout history, and predicting that culmination of the Templars' scheme to take over the world is close at hand. The plan becomes real to them--and eventually to the mysterious They, who want the information the trio has "discovered." Dense, packed with meaning, often startlingly provocative, the novel is a mixture of metaphysical meditation, detective story, computer handbook, introduction to physics and philosophy, historical survey, mathematical puzzle, compendium of religious and cultural mythology, guide to the Torah (Hebrew, rather than Latin contributes to the puzzle here, but is restricted mainly to chapter headings), reference manual to the occult, the hermetic mysteries, the Rosicrucians, the Jesuits, the Freemasons-- ad infinitum . The narrative eventually becomes heavy with the accumulated weight of data and supposition, and overwrought with implication, and its climax may leave readers underwhelmed. Until that point, however, this is an intriguing cerebral exercise in which Eco slyly suggests that intellectual arrogance can come to no good end.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

# Mass Market Paperback: 560 pages
# Publisher: Ballantine Books (November 13, 1990)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0345368754
# ISBN-13: 978-0345368751
# Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4 x 1.4 inches