Kemper's Reviews > The Serpent of Venice

Some might think that William Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe would be rolling in their graves at the way Christopher Moore has used their works, but it’s just as likely that they’d be laughing their asses off.

Moore has (In his own words.) ‘stitched together an abomination’ out of The Merchant of Venice, Othello and The Cask of Amontillado using the character of Pocket as the thread. Pocket was the hero of Moore’s last Shakespeare spoof Fool, and while he may be a Fool by training and inclination, that doesn’t mean that he’s not smart enough to get some well-deserved revenge when he gets caught up in a sinister plot in Venice involving a trio of conspirators. While the merchant Antonio, the senator Brabantio and the soldier Iago are powerful enemies, Pocket has an ally in the mighty general Othello as well as being a friend to the Jewish money lender Shylock and his daughter Jessica. Oh, and since this is a Christopher Moore novel there’s some kind of mysterious creature lurking in the canals of Venice….

There was a lot to like about this one, and as you’d expect with a Moore book, there’s plenty of laughs of a bawdy nature as well as genuine cleverness at how he integrated the three classic works of literature together. Pocket remains one of his best characters in the way that he uses his smart mouth and a sneaky nature to make up for a his lack of size.

The one complaint I’ve got is similar to the one that left me dissatisfied with Moore’s last book Sacre Bleu, and it’s the way he incorporates flashbacks. As with Sacre Bleu he starts mid-plot and doles out the history in bits and pieces throughout the book, and it can be confusing at times. For example, this book begins with Brobantio, Antonio and Iago waiting on a dock for the arrival of Pocket so they can take revenge for him. Why are the characters from two different plays working together? Why do they want revenge on Pocket? Why does he act so contemptuous of them when he arrives? You only find that out later, and it had me scratching my head so much that I actually stopped to check and see if I had missed another book featuring the Fool.

That flashback mechanism can work well when trying to build mystery or suspense, but it’s more than a little confusing when you’re already trying to establish a story that blends three works together using characters from a spoof of another play. Moore probably wanted to get right into the meat of the story, but this is the kind of thing where some time spent establishing the ground rules would make things flow better. It didn’t bother me as badly as it did in Sacre Bleu, but it was a distraction.

Still, if you want to read a tale of ‘Heinous Fuckery, most foul’ and laugh a lot while doing so, this is the book for you.