The Justice

The cover of Fool, best-selling author Christopher Moore's latest effort, warns prospective readers of the vagaries contained therein, including shagging, split infinitives and "the odd wank." From the beginning, this overly coy warning for the benefit of our virginally pure minds did not bode well.

Now I read 2003's Fluke, or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings, one of Moore's most acclaimed works, which follows marine biologist Nate Quinn through a surreal whale of an adventure. And I loved it. Fluke was hilarious. Fluke was deliciously outlandish. Fluke had its ribaldry, but every bit of it was tempered with wit and accurate descriptions that make readers snort with laughter in embarrassingly public situations. If Fool were anything like Fluke, the sheer hilarity of it would gloss over every vulgar episode thrown the reader's way. But as it turns out, Fool is not so much punctuated by the odd wank as it is a continuing spurt of vaguely Shakespearean masturbatory fiction.

In this parody of King Lear, we follow the fool, Pocket, who, we are all too quickly informed, is short of stature but large in areas Pocket seems to find more important. Accompanied by his enormous and perpetually horny apprentice, Drool, Pocket shags and swaggers his way around the set of Lear's rapidly disintegrating kingdom, alternately tossing around banter and sinking into introspection that will hopefully convince us of the perceptiveness hiding beneath his priapism. Unfortunately, the constant stream of sex (both consensual and otherwise) and varieties of crude descriptions thereof are only distractions from what are, truth be told, not Moore's most insightful witticisms. Early on in Fool, we learn from Pocket that "Life is loneliness, broken only by the gods taunting us with friendship and the odd bonk." This sage observation is about as good as it gets. Furthermore, combining flowery, tongue-in-cheek Shakespearean description with tired modernisms like "whatever" grows old before it's begun, and no number of retellings of Pocket's latest conquest of Goneril will save it.

Continued...

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