But it's a constant cycle, of course: a story is told, gets changed, reverts, gets changed again, reverts, and on and on. So King Lear will always be King Lear, but it will also always get fucked with. Maybe Lear deserves it, since it's so beautifully brutal, and even an abstract concept like a play has to expect to get slapped once in a while if it goes around constantly punching people in the gut. And certainly Christopher Moore enjoys fucking with things, so the pairing was probably inevitable.
I love Lear and I like Moore in a hit-or-miss-but-man-that-one-big-hit-was-righteous kind of way, so I was pretty stoked when I heard that Fool was coming out. I nearly bought myself the hardcover edition when I saw it at Costco a few months ago, but as hard as it is to cut back on cluttering my house up with new books, avoiding non-Stephen King hardcovers is one of the easiest tactics in that struggle. So I enjoyed the anticipation even more until it came out in paperback and I got it for my birthday. Having read it now, I'm glad I didn't invest in the hardcover. The book is good, but not great.
Spoiler - the poles to the Batcave are behind the bookshelf! Also, more spoilers below.
Fool is the story of King Lear told from the perspective of Pocket, Lear's court jester and only loyal companion and truth-teller in the course of the play. By centering the novel on Pocket, Moore is forced to flesh him out considerably, giving him a backstory and a personality well beyond what's present in Shakespeare. The expansive personality works pretty well, because Fool ends up being a direct slap in the face to the story of King Lear. To my mind, there are two ways of reacting to Shakespeare's play. One is to get into the spirit of Tragedy and realize that the outsize characters in the story, especially Lear himself, make mistakes that compound each other and escalate wildly out of control. If you can relate to Lear, if you can think of one time in your life where you really wanted someone to reassure you emotionally and they let you down and you reacted in a regrettable way, then you can enjoy the agony of that moment when Lear banishes Cordelia and sets himself on the road to ruin. It's a sad story that ends badly, but the reader/audience gets out of it a certain painful cathartic release. The second way to read King Lear is to be a smartass, to look at the characters and say "these people are idiots who get what they deserve" and tick off every way that each escalating mistake could have been avoided. Moore goes the second route and does so via Pocket's perspective, since he is the character most well-equipped to pronounce everyone around him a moron. The Pocket in Moore's novel is clever and shrewd and embraces his lot in life because he can say and do whatever he wants because no one takes him seriously (which of course is both a blessing and a curse). So Pocket makes a lot of pointed observations and mocks the characters and actions around him, and Moore is a good enough humor writer that most of it is pretty funny. Pocket's reactions all make sense within the story, but they also work as criticism (however juvenile) of the original play as well.
I think Moore overreaches a bit, however, in making Fool such a romp. Not only is Moore's Pocket more than just a foil for Lear's madness, Moore's Pocket is a bonafide protagonist, a quick-witted schemer who sets a great deal of the plot in motion. (He also has a great deal of sex, with almost all of the female characters, which is fine and funny in and of itself but runs itself a bit into the ground by the end.) The civil war between Goneril and Regan is fomented by Pocket. Edmund's treachery against Edgar is abetted by Pocket. Even France's invasion of Britain is caused by Pocket, in a way. And of course, it turns out that Pocket is both related to King Lear and his origin is wrapped up in Lear's villainy. These root causes are all explained in the book and make perfect sense, but they effectively elevate Pocket clear out of the innocent bystander status that he's supposed to share with the audience.
And, to circle back to Hob's criticism again, Moore gives the book a happy ending. I suppose I should have expected a comedy to have a happy ending, but I thought it would be happy for Pocket and Pocket alone. Moore points out numerous times that Pocket's fool's motley is jet black, and I believe I catch his meaning there: the novel is a black comedy. Because everybody dies at the end! Except, in Moore's version, Cordelia is at the head of the conquering French army and the reason she conquered Britain was to be reunited with Pocket, whom she has always loved. Pocket and Cordelia get married and he rules the court while she continues conquering Europe. It's a ludicrous ending which is in keeping with the goofiness of the entire book, but I admit I was disappointed by it. I wanted to see if and how Pocket could keep laughing through the whole tragedy, but that wasn't the story I was reading. It's unfair to judge a book against what you wanted it to be, instead of for what it is, but so it goes.
One last thing that bugged me about the book: footnotes. And don't get me wrong, I love me some footnotes in my novels. I have a whole GoodReads bookshelf dedicated to novels that have gone that route. But the footnotes have to have a purpose, whether it's creating verisimilitude in House of Leaves or telling substantial parts of the kaleidoscopic story in Infinite Jest. The footnotes in Fool didn't seem to add up to much. Usually they were translations of British slang or archaic English. First of all, if you don't know what "dugs" are, then what are you doing reading Shakespeare-derived satire? Second of all, if the meaning of "dugs" somehow eluded you to this point, I'm pretty sure the context clues about female anatomy and nursing would clue you in without a superscript numeral and a definition at the bottom of the page. Some of the footnotes were written in Pocket's crude and self-undermining voice, but some were staggeringly straightforward and boring in addition to insulting to the intelligence, and then again some of them were so anachronistic in referring to, for example, office Christma sparties that they couldn't have been meant to be in pocket's voice at all, and having to decide if the footnote is from the author or Pocket is way too disruptive. I kept expecting one last footnote to tell me to go back through and read just the footnotes in order for some kind of secret message punchline, but that last key footnote never arrived. Although that does give me an idea to use in my own literature-mocking novella someday.
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