Another reviewer used the word "bawdy" to describe Fool, and this is an excellent choice. Therefore, I will steal it. This bawdy retelling of Shakespeare's King Lear is a quintessential Christopher Moore mash-up novel. If you like Christopher Moore's mash-up novels, then I am sure you will like this one. If you find them somewhat tedious, then you will not.

When he is at his best, Christopher Moore's books resemble what would happen if Carl Hiaasen decided to inhabit the territory between "fantasy" and "magical realism." (As opposed to the territory he inhabits now, which is… well, it's best described as "Carl Hiaasen.") Moore's writing carries the story along with an admirable swiftness, pelting you with funny things as you whoosh along, only to be deposited at the end of the book with a startling thud, thinking, "It's over already?"

I enjoy the odd Moore novel. (And they are all odd. Rimshot!) This is the first that I have listened to in audiobook form, and I wonder if that isn't partly to blame for the somewhat sour experience. I often find that I read far faster than someone speaking. Perhaps I tend to skim a bit when I get really into a book. At any rate, I often find that I gloss over problems with a text when I read it in hard copy. Whereas the slower, more descriptive (thanks to the vocal performance) experience of an audiobook encourages rumination on a book's problems.

In a nutshell, Fool promises to do for King Lear what "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" did for Hamlet. But it doesn't quite deliver. Where Stoppard took Hamlet into the metaphysical realm, Moore stays squarely in ours. But he adds a lot more sex, and a very cartoonish sort, at that. I don't think of myself as a prude, but geez.

Fool is told from the perspective of the king's jester, Pocket. Pocket is small, and frail, and very clever. Pocket ends up engineering the main events of King Lear. Whereas Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were (charmingly, haplessly) swept up in their plot, Pocket is the one driving his.

I also got a little bit bogged down and turned around by Moore's cheerful appropriation of bits and pieces from a lot of other Shakespeare plays. I frequently found myself questioning my knowledge of King Lear (which I thought I knew pretty well) until I realized what Moore was doing. This isn't a bad thing, but I might have been less vexed by the book if I had known about this going into it.

In the end, I gave up about 75% of the way through. For one thing, I knew how the story ended. For another thing, I grew tired of the "jester plays puppetmaster" thing, and I failed to make a meaningful connection with the character of Pocket.

Fool also suffers from some pacing problems. Almost all of which, I'm sad to say, happen because of sex. Whenever sex comes on stage, the entire story stops dead. And sex comes on stage pretty much every ten minutes or so. It gets a bit tiresome, and I'm afraid the book wore out its welcome with me before I was through.