Fool

Fool by Christopher Moore (2009), 311pp.

Christopher Moore is a comic novelist and the author of about a dozen books with titles like Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story and The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror. Before Fool, my only experience with Moore was his book Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, which gives an account of where Jesus traveled and what he did during the years of his adolescence and early adulthood not covered in the four canonical gospels. Lamb is likely the only (loosely) Biblically based book in existence in which the Kama Sutra figures—though it is Biff, not Jesus, who learns from it, this should give you some idea about Moore’s comedy nonetheless.

Fool is a retelling of Shakespeare’s great tragedy—some have argued his greatest tragedy—King Lear, a play about an old king who divides his kingdom among his daughters, is betrayed by them, and ends up wandering through the English countryside yelling in the rain. Seriously though, King Lear features some of the most outstanding speechifying in English, and taking it on from a comic perspective shows some major, ahem, cojones on Moore’s part. PLUS, fools, or court jesters, appear frequently in Shakespeare’s plays, but Lear’s fool is one of his darkest and most sophisticated, which only makes my previous point about Moore’s cojones more true. I came to Fool initially because I love Shakespeare—this was a mistake. Pretty much the one guideline I would put forth in recommending this book is: don’t do that. Read this book if you love Moore or comic novels or are looking for something fun and irreverent. Do not read it solely because you are a fan of Shakespeare or King Lear. You will not find what you’re looking for.

This may seem like a simple proposition, but it took me about a third of the book to figure it out. At first, I was having a pretty lackluster time. I was finding the story a bit silly and not quite true to plot, the language an uneasy marriage of modern and archaic, and the allusions distractingly anachronistic (at one point Pocket, the title fool, quotes William Blake). Then, about a hundred pages in, I finally came to terms with the obvious point that Fool isn’t Shakespeare and isn’t supposed to be. Once I unshackled myself from this expectation, I couldn't help but be entertained. Because ultimately, Moore’s genius (and incidentally, this was Shakespeare’s, too) is that he creates from existing source material something totally and completely his own. Fool is much less an adapted from King Lear than it is inspired by it—a story about a fool that just happens to be Lear’s fool. And because Moore allows himself these liberties, he’s able to create characters, a world, and a story that are interesting and compelling in their own right. He struck exactly the right note between showing his knowledgeability of Shakespeare’s canon and medieval England (the story is set in the thirteenth century) and showing his disregard for fidelity to the facts. My favorite part of the book is that Moore borrows liberally from Shakespeare’s other plays—most prominently from Macbeth, but lines from Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet make an appearance as well. And of course, in true Shakespearean fashion, “there’s always a bloody ghost.”

This is a bawdy book with no shortage of bonking (one of Pocket’s many inventive words for sex). It’s is, on the whole, antic and absurd, but it is not without depth. At times it also managed to be sad—downright poignant, even—and uncomfortably frank about the inhumanities often enacted by those in power.

Fool is quite different from what I normally read, but it made for an excellent change of pace. Rigid practitioners of Bardolatry excepted, I would recommend this pretty much anyone. It is fun, imaginative, and offers the chance to see a seminal work of Anglo culture desecrated in the best possible way.