Fool is a book I ran across in one of the audio book forums I peruse. I decided to try it because people were raving about Moore and it sounded like my kind of humour. The story is basically Shakespear's King Lear in very, very modern language. I had been forewarned that it was quite vulgar, but I wasn't quite prepared for the extent of the language. Some of it I felt was fine, but especially at the beginning of the book it felt a bit forced, as if Moore was actually making an effort to insert as much foul language into the book as humanly possible. While I'll concede that some of it was appropriate and lent a certain tone to some of the characters, a lot of it was just unnecessary and really just detracted from the humour of the rest of the book. It felt a bit like having to dig through profanity to find the humour.
Having said that, it the humour was there and if you don't care to read Shakespearean English, it's an enjoyable, if not entirely accurate, option. If you like sarcasm, innuendo, and puns, it's a fun read. However, I think I'll stick to Pratchett in the future. He's just so much better even though he doesn't try half as hard. I've given this one two stars in my ratings and I probably won't be reading any more of Moore's books.
2 comments:
I remember in high school one of my teachers explaining what some of Shakespeare's phrases actually referred to- and I was shocked at how much bawdy material was in there! he was cracking dirty jokes left and right, only none of understand it any more. I'm guessing if I read Shakespeare in modern lingo I wouldn't care for it at all...
I haven't read anything by Christopher Moore but I've been curious. I do better with reading this type of stuff rather than listening to it, though. Does seem quite as jarring.
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