I don’t remember King Lear having so much snogging. OK to be fair retelling the Lear story by Christopher Moore you have to expect a few differences. The aforementioned snogging, bawdy language (The Bard wasn’t shy of bawdy language either), lots of sarcasm and snark, and overall merriment along with a bloody ghost. There is always a ghost isn’t there?

Fool: A Novel takes the idea of retelling a Shakespeare play from the point of view of a minor character, much like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard which I suppose you can compare Fool to other than Stoppard’s is a play and Fool a novel.  But they are in the same vain.

I would say that the Stoppard play surpasses Fool but I’m not really here to do a comparison of the two works.  Fine, in comparison, Stoppard’s play is wittier, has made the minor characters more interesting, and did it with more panache than Moore does with Fool.  But that is not saying that Fool stinks.

It doesn’t.  Not by a long shot.

Those of you that enjoy Moore’s work will love Fool.  You are familiar with Moore’s style and sense of humor, juvenile at times, and I suspect you are familiar with his voice from his prior work. Fool is no different.  It is funny, has great dialog, witty remarks, great characters, and copious amounts of swearing.  IT also includes witches, ghosts, fighting, and crazy people.  Pretty much everything you find in a Moore novel.

Moore’s take on Lear takes plenty of liberties but it doesn’t affect the story that much since Moore states that it is not a faithful telling of the Bard’s tale but more of a fun bastardization(my word, not Moore’s) of the play.

Pocket is the Fool and he has a Fool’s assistant, Drool.  Pocket has a back story involving being an orphan and growing up in a Nunnery which sounds more like a private whorehouse than a cloister (all funny mind you).  Well you can read the synopsis here.

Moore has a knack for building fun characters, if at times completely absurd or a bit larger than life.  Which actually fits his style of writing.  He would be remiss in writing a satirical, whimsical story and not include overblown characters. The characters that populate Moore novels are, at times, worthy of being included in some of the better characters that come out of American letters. Though I suspect since there are tons of fart and dick jokes in his novels, he isn’t going to be getting a National Book Award (though Stephen King did get one so maybe the idea of Moore getting one might not be too far fetched.)

The characters that Moore creates tend to be people we know.  With subtle flaws and they are thrust into situations that are far beyond their comfort zones.  In Fool, Pocket’s comfort zone is shattered, literally, when the King loses his mind and bequeaths his kingdom to his conniving daughters and banishes his one honest daughter from England.  Pocket finds his everyday life thrown asunder and the rest of the story is a series of reactions to this initial upheaval.  And through these reactions we see what kind of person Pocket is;  he is a loyal friend to a fault, witty, smart, if not in a traditional sense, and compassionate. ( this is not including his character of playing the Fool which includes a rapier wit that allows him to drop insult from his tongue at a moments notice.  And good insults, nothing mundane or unoriginal).

This wit that Fool has is, of course, because of Moore.  No matter how much we say that Pocket is witty and so forth, what we are really saying is, the author is witty and his ideas that he has put down on paper for us to read  is excellent fare.

Overall Fool has few negatives and could be one of Moore’s best books to date.  I tend to think that A Dirty Job: A Novel is is best with Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal a close second. But Fool is very close to usurping both.

Overall rating- 9 of 10.

[Nook, BN, AMZN]

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