![]() ![]() “I expect the reader’s palette is reasonably broad,” Roberta Antonia Wilson remarks at the end of the first chapter of 2023, “so they will notice I have borrowed from two monuments of twentieth-century literature.” The use of palette, the range of colours used by a painter, rather than palate, meaning a sense of taste, is curious. The significance of the numbers 23 and 17 can be traced to the “23/17 phenomenon” mentioned in the Illuminatus! trilogy (1975), a series of novels that featured fictional conspiratorial group the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (who lend their name to Drummond and Cauty’s earliest musical incarnation), written by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. They vow not to talk about this event for 23 years, which takes us up to 2017 when they produce 2023, a “utopian costume drama”, supposedly written on the island of Jura in 1984 by Roberta Antonia Wilson using the pen name “George Orwell”. In 1948 George Orwell writes Nineteen Eighty-Four on the isle of Jura in 1994 Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty go to the selfsame island to burn £1m of royalties from their group the KLF. ![]() ![]() ![]() A s with any book that has a number for a title, one expects a little numerology, and it’s no surprise that the grand precursor of this genre is used to balance an equation and establish a mise en scène. ![]()
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