Fool by Christopher Moore
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.
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Originally published at Dr. Johnson's Compendium of Books. You can comment here or there.