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Fool by Christopher Moore

February 13th, 2010 · Posted by Skuds in Life · No Comments · Life

This week I finished reading Fool by Christopher Moore.   It was another of the freebies from Amazon’s Vine programme, and one of the best things I have got through the scheme because not only was it a good read but it introduced me to an author who was new to me but who has written a load of other books.  This means that if I find myself stuck for something to read at any point in the future, there are at least ten other books I can turn to.Here is what I wrote on Amazon:

King Lear’s fool, Pocket, has very modest ambitions: he would happily settle for a monkey that he could dress in a waistcoat and call Jeff, but instead he has to deal with witches and ghosts, the prospect of two wars, and the fact that every nobleman in the country wants to see him hanged before breakfast.

The book is based on Shakespeare’s King Lear but only loosely, and incorporates elements from several of Shakespeare’s other plays as well. I think it works without a deep knowledge of those plays, although no doubt such knowledge will just make it even better for the reader. Personally it is over twenty years since I read King Lear and I can’t remember much of it, but that did not stop me really enjoying this book.

The surprise for me was just how English the book is considering it was written by an American. Even the swearing (and there is a LOT of swearing) is English rather than American. Even the very rare Americanism has been put in there deliberately as are other anachronisms. In an afterword the author does explain about the lack of historical accuracy and how it is all deliberate.

The language is very direct and down-to-earth and the whole thing is like a dictionary definition of ‘bawdy’. In that one respect it really is authentically Shakespearian.

Perhaps it flagged a bit at the end when plot took priority over description, but by that time I was turning pages at a fair rate to find out what happens next anyway.

Apparently Christopher Moore has written at least ten other books, but somehow I have managed to avoid hearing about him. If the other books are even half as good as this one I will be catching up with them soon.

One difficulty of reviewing the book for Amazon is that the reviews are censored or filtered for bad language  to a certain extent, so I couldn’t mention the running joke about how France is always refered to as “fucking France” as if that is its proper name.  Even the map at the front of the book has it labelled as such – a nice little touch I thought.

I also had to avoid giving any examples of the bad language and its Englishness which is such an integral part of the book.  The appeal, by the way, is not the language itself so much as the fact that it really demonstrates the licence given to fools to talk to the king or nobles in a way that would see anybody else summarily executed.  Knowing that the author was American I was quite surprised to see words like ‘shag’, ‘bonk’, ‘git’ and ‘tosser’ used in a way that is natural to us but surely totally foreign to Americans.

For me the sure sign that I enjoyed it was how quickly I read it.  I normally have only a small amount of time every day put aside for reading, small enough that it could take me a couple of weeks to read a book.  In this case I got through it in a few days.

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