Even if the mere thought of a new offering from Christopher Moore, author of such hilariously satirical novels as Bloodsucking Fiends and Island of the Sequined Love Nun, isn’t enough to set readers’ imaginations whirling, the brilliant blurb on the back of Fool is sure to do the trick:

This is a bawdy tale. Herein you will find gratuitous shagging, murder, spanking, maiming, treason, and heretofore unexplored heights of vulgarity and profanity … If that’s the sort of thing you think you might enjoy, then you have happened upon the perfect story!

In writing Fool, Christopher Moore has set himself quite a challenge – he has attempted a radical (and rascally) reimaging of King Lear, one of Shakespeare’s most revered tragedies. As unlikely as it may sound, however, Moore has pulled off his foray into surrealist Shakespearean satire with great aplomb. Fittingly, given Moore’s desire to turn tragedy into comedy, the narrator of Fool is King Lear’s court jester. The eponymous Fool is Pocket, a short of stature and shorter still of morals foundling, who was raised in a nunnery until various nefarious teenage shenanigans led to his being turn out to earn a living through his wits. Being a multi-talented fellow – he can caper, insult, throw knives, forge letters and even make the melancholy Princess Cordelia chortle – Pocket found employment at the court of the unwitting and indeed witless King of the Britons, Lear. Unfortunately for Pocket, while the fool can do no wrong in the eyes of the King, just about every other original Shakespearean character wants to kill him.

As Fool opens, the plot stays fairly true to that of King Lear. Lear is growing old and so wants to divide his kingdom between his three daughters but, being a vain and conceited old man, he decides to base the apportionment on how much his daughters tell him that they love him. While his two eldest daughters, Goneril and Regan, flatter him with false words of love, Lear’s youngest daughter tells him the truth and so he foolishly disinherits her. As Cordelia is banished and married off to a French Prince, Lear divides his kingdom equally between Goneril and Regan on the proviso that he will spend half the year living with one of them and half the year with the other.

Before long, of course, Lear’s two favoured daughters are cuckolding their pompous husbands, scheming against each other, vying for the affections of Edmund, bastard son of the Duke of Gloucester, and neglecting their dear old dad. Heart-broken and abandoned, barking-mad Lear is driven from the castle and out into a terrible storm with only Pocket left to sort matters out for him. Even for a fool as skilled in the ribald as Pocket, such a task is no easy matter for there are many things rotten in the state of Britain – there have been a spate of murders, madness, sexual intrigue, witchcraft, war and even ghostly visions. But, with a little help from fool in training Drool and the three witches from Macbeth – Parsley, Sage and Rosemary (“What, no Thyme?” “Oh, we’ve got the time if you’ve got the inclination, handsome”) – Pocket dons his best motley and rises to the challenge.

Fool is a hell of a lot of fun. Moore has taken the tragedy of King Lear and turned it into a laughter inducing combination of darkness, comedy and medieval action porn. The humour might well be bawdy and the language some of the most creatively colourful that I have read in a while but it all serves to enhance, rather than detract from, the story. While the plot of King Lear forms the backbone of Fool, Moore has deviated from it and the other Shakespearean characters and devices that he evokes in several key, and devious, ways that result in Fool being an ingenious work in its own right rather than merely an homage. Innuendo-laden and wonderfully depraved, Fool is a gut-bustingly hilarious book and a joy to read.

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