What we have here is x amount of pages that can be ultimately distilled down to "yes, all conspiracy theories are for real, haha". In the meantime, you get to experience the lives and times of three very cardboard ciphers named Belbo, Diotallevi and Casaubon as they oh-so cleverly dick their way around northern Italy and the world. Vapid inconsequential human parodies.

Mind you, this is "literary fiction", which means, inter alia that it's a free-form exercise in cramming as many pages as you can with verbose workouts about nothing in particular. Even translated from Italian. I think the idea is you're meant to take a glass of sherry in hand, purse your lips and find a good leather chair in front of a fireplace to read it. Bollocks. It's a tiresome and dreary doorstop masquerading as a work of higher intellectualism. It's a cult item written for a cult audience.

The story itself has potential - a potential possibly realised by the dozens of authors who have written about the Illuminati, Knights Templar et al, before and since. But there's no true story here. None at all. It never gets the chance to shine.