Review: Fool, by Christopher Moore

Rating:

^{🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹}

First Response:

After yesterday's fun romp, I wasn't prepared for this book to tug my heartstrings the way it did!

One Sentence Summary:

Pocket is the fool in the court of King Lear (yes, THAT King Lear); and while the events of Shakespeare's play are unfolding, Pocket is playing out his own hilarious, heartfelt drama in the background.

Tell Me More:

This is the book where I was SUPPOSED to meet Pocket of Dog-Snogging, until Libby did me wrong.

Reading the first book after I'd already read the third (see yesterday's review) had a number of unforeseen side effects-- mainly, I would notice the first time a long running joke still present in the third book appeared, and suddenly all the accumulated laughs of all its instances would hit all at once, leaving me almost paralyzed with laughter-- but perhaps the biggest difference between this book and Shakespeare for Squirrels is it's tone. Squirrels is a spin off of A Midsummer Night's Dream, one of Shakespeare's comedies. Pocket's comedic banter dovetails nicely with the comedic plot and tone of that play, and he fits into it almost invisibly.

King Lear, on which this book is based, is not a comedy.

It's a tragedy.

A lot of people die in this one, and not for laughs.

Moore is a comedic writer, and Pocket (or simply Fool, as he was known in the original play) is a comedic character; but applying a comedic veneer to a tragedy leads to different result than applying a comedic veneer to a comedy. This one, however, works.

And it works really well.

The formula for this book is essentially the same as it was for Shakespeare for Squirrels (and yes, I know that technically this book came first, so it should be the other way around, but I read Squirrels first, so I'm referencing the series the wrong way around): The events of Shakespeare's play occur in almost perfect sync with their famous dramatic counterpart, while we watch Pocket weave his way through those events. Sometimes he even causes those events to occur. There's a mysterious, magical side character who whisks in and out (in Squirrels it was Rumor and his coat of tongues; in Fool it's a ghost (because there's always a ghost!) who dispenses odd rhyming prophecies) frustrating Pocket with their vague indications about what he should do to move the story forward. While this one isn't explicitly a detective novel in the way Squirrels was, there are a number of flashbacks and revelations that twist the narrative just as powerfully.

Lear is a tragic figure in a tragic story, and the fool in the original play acts as a foil by highlighting the king's folly as he slowly descends from glory to the gutter. Because of the objective nature of theatre (i.e., because we can't see inside the Fool's head) he's a bit of a cipher on the original play. By flipping the script and giving Pocket so much depth, Fool asks us to question the tragedy of the original text. Granted, several of the images the novel creates to make this point are invented out of whole cloth, and have no precedent in the original text (At least, I don't think they do-- it's also been a minute since I read King Lear. It's not my favorite Shakespeare play either.); nonetheless, the book forces us to confront realities of power that were unquestioned when Shakespeare first wrote his play, but by the light of the twenty-first century deserve a reevaluation.

All of that being said, this book was still an incredibly fun ride. I got to learn Pocket's backstory and giggle at an impressive number of dick jokes like I was a thirteen year old boy again. The tragedy mixed with comedy played my heartstrings like a fiddle, as I've always loved a touch of melancholy with my laughter. I highly recommend this book, though perhaps not for the same teenage audience as I lauded for Squirrels. King Lear isn't a particularly easy play to get into, and isn't taught in schools the way Midsummer is. I'm not saying the teenage or YA audience couldn't appreciate this book-- I'm sure they could-- but King Lear isn't as accessible as ye olde fairie romp. When I was volunteering as a theatre tech with my community theatre in college, I once had a teenage boy tell me that his school had staged King Lear as one of their dramatic productions, and it was extremely difficult to make the play relevant for that audience. It makes sense, on the one hand-- Lear is a play about the twilight of life, after all-- but on the other, it makes me sad to think that such a profoundly moving portrayal of interfamilial politics and end-of-life care (or, perhaps more fittingly, the lack of end-of-life care) is so hard for teenagers to relate to. Death comes for us all-- some swiftly, some slowly, and Lear teaches us to remember that fact.