The book is okay (I think I gave it three stars on Goodreads?) but in my opinion it suffers from Neal Stephenson syndrome: the book kinda just ends without a whole lot of anticlimax or resolution. The pacing is all over the place and the supporting cast are more like character sketches than characters.
I think Foucault’s Pendulum is a significantly better novel that uses the basic themes in more compelling ways.
It was an online serial. Any new plotline or character is a live experiment that might publicly fail to work out. That kind of thing does indeed need a lot of work to become a conventionally structured novel. That said I actually thought the ending was pretty alright. Well, most of it.
I read the whole thing and enjoyed both the premise and the writing, but yeah, it would have benefited considerably from the attention of a professional editor and a couple of rounds of rewrites.
I think Foucault’s Pendulum is a significantly better novel that uses the basic themes in more compelling ways.