Although the trial that Lear puts him through upon finding this out had one line so funny it had me laughing so hard for so long my wife asked what was wrong with me.
We also get lots and lots (and lots) of detail that perhaps we didn’t need, like the fact that Pocket was sleeping with both Regan and Goneril. We learn many things about the backstory that we’ve always wondered, like the deal with Cordelia’s mother, and more history on Lear’s temper. The plot progresses while staying surprisingly true to the Shakespeare’s version (and, I learned, often dipping into Shakespeare’s own source material). He’s also the source of much of the more bawdy humor, as he’s pretty much willing to shag anything that will stand still, including an oak tree with a knothole. Drool also happens to have several traits that are crucial to advancing the plot – he’s monstrously strong, incredibly dimwitted, and has an unnatural gift of speaking in other people’s voices. Instead I’m talking about the “other” fool, the apprentice to Pocket, named Drool. Sure there’s a ghost and the witches of Birnam Wood, but I appreciate that those were more like cameo appearances for the benefit of the Shakespeare geeks. New characters are introduced, who are not in the story at all. It doesn’t take long, however, for the story to lose a few points with me. As I said, I’m not familiar with Moore’s work – but if he writes like this all the time, I’m going to go and get more of it. Only now we get running commentary from the foul-mouthed Fool, who is given the name Pocket for the sake of the story.
Ok then! The story does jump right in exactly as I was expecting, a comic novelization of the general plot, picked up right at Act I, Scene I with Gloucester talking about his bastard son. Herein you will find gratuitous shagging, murder, spanking, maiming, treason, and heretofore unexplored heights of vulgarity and profanity, as well as nontraditional grammar, split infinitives, and the odd wank. My review copy arrived wrapped in a plain brown wrapper with a warning label letting me know just what I was in for: This is a bawdy tale. You might be asking yourself the same thing I did – how do you have the Fool narrate, when we Shakespeare geeks know what happens to him at the end of the story? Thanks to my friends at Harper Collins I was able to find out. Actually I read someone else’s review where he said the opposite, he knew Moore’s work but nothing of King Lear itself. I don’t know anything about the author, Christopher Moore – but I know King Lear. When I heard on Twitter that somebody’d rewritten King Lear from the Fool’s point of view, I was interested.
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