The Serpent of Venice, by Christopher Moore

[rowyn]

The Serpent of Venice reads like self-insert Shakespeare fanfic. It's the sequel to an earlier book, Fool, which from the sounds of it was self-insert fanfic for "King Lear". I grabbed Serpent on a whim out of the "new release" racks at the library, and didn't realize it was a sequel, so I read it first. "Self-insert" is not strictly accurate: the "self" character is the Fool from "King Lear". In Moore's book, though, he's a first-person narrator and the action revolves around him, and that makes him feel less like a character belonging to the original than one whose purpose is to comment upon the original and defy its restrictions and conventions.

Serpent combines several works: Edgar Allen Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" (only pertinent to the first of the book's five parts), Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice" and "Othello", and a dash of The Travels of Marco Polo. As an original element, apparently somehow inspired by Polo, it adds in a raping sea monster because WHAT.

... The sea monster rapist came out of left field for me. I found it rather disturbing. In the afterword, the author says the he put the "sex"* bit in because "I just thought that would be funny". OH CHRISTOPHER MOORE NO. It may be that the author is of the opinion that since the rape victim was the male protagonist and it didn't involve penetration, it's not "rape-rape". The male protagonist doesn't seem to know how to feel about the experience himself.

The pastiche is about 1 part parody, 1 part comedy, 2 parts drama, and 1 part horror. Despite fourth-wall breaking references (there's a Chorus that the rest of the cast responds to whenever he shows up to comment), the plot makes sense in the context of the setting -- it's not Spaceballs-style goofiness. It's readable, engaging, and well-paced. Actual Shakespeare dialogue gets sprinkled into the narrative here and there, in all its lyric beauty; sometimes this works well, and sometimes itKs jarring in contrast to the banal qualities of the surrounding text.It's not as funny as it thinks it is, but works despite that. Moore's Othello captures the spirit of Shakespeare's in a charming way. Shylock gets to be a protagonist (of a sort) and that works naturally. Bassanio is the familiar well-intentioned handsome blockhead you expect him to be. There is a fair share of good stuff in here, much of it not directly pillaged from Shakespeare.

This said, there were some things that didn't work for me. The raping monster. It was not funny. That the reader was intended to find it funny made it cast a long shadow of WTF over the rest of the story for me.

The crudity. Granted that Shakespeare is frequently crude, especially with his clowns, and this is all about a clown, but even so, I found the constant torrent of obscenities and onslaught of rude jokes grating. This is not erotica: the author is coy about describing actual sex. But if you took out all the obscenities, sex jokes, talk about anatomy, and scatlogical references out, you'd probably cut about a third of the book and 80% of the humor. Honestly, it is a true testament to Moore's skill that he could pack SO MUCH crudeness into a book and have me like it ANYWAY. I still found the juvenile humor tedious, but I was able to overlook it and enjoy the book.

Oh, and the book runs on dead-woman fuel. I never used to notice how much fiction does. ("Need to motivate your male protagonist? Kill off his mother/wife/daughter!") But once it was pointed out to me, I realized it was everywhere and it's really tiresome. *sigh*

Anyway, I'll give it a 7 overall. I might give another Moore book a try sometime. They can't all be powered by rapist monsters and dead women, so they'll have that much going for them. I'm kinda worried the juvenile humor is a permanent fixture, alas.

* Also, if you want to alienate me, refering to clearly NOT CONSENSUAL sexual abuse as "sex" is a great start. In case you were wondering.

Comments

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

This sounds really weird, and also not necessarily like something I'd want to read. Although I'm curious about the sea serpent now.

'Fueled by dead women' kind of reminds me of a JRPG cliché where the hero's idyllic farming village would always be burned down by the bad guy to motivate him.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Yeah, about like that. The hero needs rage!

[rowyn]

I am reminded of Ultima letting you play a shepherd as one of the classes (representing the virtue of humility), only because it was so unlike all the other games of the genre. :)

[rowyn]

Yeah. :/

For the first Sword & Sorceress anthology, Marion Zimmer Bradley said most of their story submissions were "protagonist seeking revenge against her rapist". Like that was literally the only thing most writers could think of if asked to write a female protagonist in a fantasy story. IIRC the book actually did have multiple "protagonist gets revenge for rape" stories because the editors couldn't get enough stories that didn't use that trope. D:

The book was really weird. You'd think the overlap of "Shakespeare fans" and "people who like juvenile humor" and "rapist sea monsters" would not be large enough to attract a big audience, but this was in the "New & Notable" category so it's probably well-received. I expect this is a credit to Moore's talent more than the popularity of his subject matter. It was a lot better than I would've expected from the last two items. :)

Remind me and I'll tell you more about the sea monster.

[jorrocks-j.livejournal.com]

I'll never forget being sixteen, seeing Lord Foul's Bane as a Science Fiction Book Club Selection of the Month and ordering it just on the strength of that awesomely creepy (and strikingly well-composed) cover:



"Hoooooowdy-hoooooo, wretched mortal!"


Then settling in to read it and thinking...um, hey, is this a grownup who's supposed to be writing this? You know, someone more experienced and better-educated and, well, smarter than me? Because the prose is wooden and the hero is two-dimensional and...

...and then I hit the rape scene. Hoo boy. Yeah, rape. Rape a young girl. Rape a young girl who only wants to help you. That'll make me want to follow your adventures through three volumes' worth of the worst prose this side of The Anglo-Hungarian Phrasebook.

For a long time I fiercely believed that there was something substantially fucking broken in Stephen R. Donaldson. But now I don't. His attitudes towards rape seem pretty normal for the fandom, and for the culture at large.

I just seem to have the irremediable handicap of having been raised right.

[rowyn]

I read all six of the Thomas Covenant books.

I remember nothing.

Okay, not quite nothing. Thomas had leprosy. He went from the USA to a fantasy land ... somehow. His wedding band was important there because it was made of white gold. I think he didn't believe anyone or anything in the fantasyland was real for a long time?

Aaaand that's the extent of my memories of the books. I'd find out more by reading the back cover than I remember about it. Weirdly, this was all I remembered about them when I was in college, so I had managed to forget them in their entirety in a matter of a few years.

I don't really want to remember.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

I tried reading them but didn't even get to the rape scene. They were just really boring.

[jorrocks-j.livejournal.com]

It's a bit like running on a treadmill, isn't it? You've covered all this ground and yet you've gone nowhere and seen nothing.

[rowyn]

I'm at the point where it surprises me when I do remember a film or a book well. I saw "A Clockwork Orange" once 25 years ago and I still remember most of the major plot points and scenes distinctly. Now THAT was a horrific film. Brilliant. Well-executed. Horrific.

[jorrocks-j.livejournal.com]

The only good thing about Lord Foul's Bane was the filksong it (apparently) inspired:

Leprosy:
I've got pieces falling off of me.
I'm not half the man I used to be,
Since I contracted
Leprosy.

Suddenly
All my friends seem to be far away:
They have "urgent business" every day.
Oh leprosy
Came suddenly.

Women
Scream and run
Ev'ry time my pants I doff:
Certainly
My sex life
Seems to have--dropped off...

Leprosy:
I've got pieces falling off of me.
I'm not a third the man I used to be,
Since I contracted
Leprosy.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Oh good grief. THAT BOOK. Okay, I had to do a Google check to see if it was the one I thought, but the way you described it, I figured that had to be it. "Book One in the Thomas Covenant Series." Yep. That's got to be it.

I have to stifle the urge to grab a random object and fling it at the wall right now, just thinking about it. No, seriously. I read a lot of things that offend me, but -- ARRRRRGH. I couldn't read any further past that scene. I don't know how the story continued, whether there were any redeeming qualities, or what, but even if someone trustworthy were to tell me today, "Oh, you should have kept reading -- it got better!" -- NO.

When I read that as a kid (circa 1986 or 1987, I think), I just felt ... well, I couldn't articulate it then. But in retrospect, I would say I felt VIOLATED, cheated, tricked, taken for a ride, slapped in the face -- something like that. I felt as if some sort of assumed trust between writer and reader had been broken. I mean, I had read books in which the protagonist would do things that I would not morally approve of -- but there were generally CLUES early on that the character is sleazy or "roguish" or "pragmatic" or any number of things, so I shouldn't be TOO shocked when he does something "unconventional" later on.

For whatever reason, I just didn't see it coming in that case. Part of it was that I was loaned the book by a friend; it was from her dad's collection, and she'd taken it along while we were on a group summer trip. When I reached that point in the book, I just stopped, and brooded over it for a bit, and quietly handed it back -- never explained, never asked why in the world her dad would have such a book and not, oh, promptly burn it or toss it in the trash or, I don't know what the proper reaction is for such things.

It's far enough ago that I can't have that strong a feeling for what EXACTLY was going through my head, but I think I was privately worried that if I expressed my distress over the particulars of the book, I would be chided as a prude and out of touch and so forth. I'd gotten a similar reaction not long before when I had voiced concerns about a certain scene in Stephen King's "It" that (thankfully) never made it into the TV mini-series later on concerning how our young protagonists ... neh. Never mind. Not going to describe it. If you absolutely HAVE to know, just do a Google on "Stephen King's It controversial scene" and I bet it'll be up near the top of the hits.

Grr.

[terrana.livejournal.com]

For a long time I fiercely believed that there was something substantially fucking broken in Stephen R. Donaldson. But now I don't. His attitudes towards rape seem pretty normal for the fandom, and for the culture at large.

That doesn't mean Donaldson isn't broken. It means the fandom and culture are.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Heh. And that particular JRPG cliche reminds me of the typical short, nigh-obligatory character background in most of the early fantasy RPG campaigns I was part of or ran into. "My village/family/castle/town/housecat was slaughtered by orcs/kobolds/goblins/lizardmen/paladins, and therefore I am morally justified in slaughtering every last one of them on sight!"

Extra points for later games when we'd be in more morally-grey settings where there'd be a Faction A and Faction B, and the GM was lax enough to let us "play whatever (we) want," and you'd have Player A whose background involves his family/etc. being slaughtered by Faction B, and for Player B, it's the other way around, and then we get to have a nice bout of dueling anecdotes as they argue over who's the good guy, inventing new details to their backstories on the spot, while the GM looks on in bemuse-- no, correction. A-musement. Because if the players "entertain" themselves, it makes the GM's job easier, right? ;)

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

I don't suppose there's any "good old days" I can point to when attitudes were perfectly lined up, but I am angered every time jokes are made about someone going to jail, and, "Oh, Bubba's going to be your new best friend," or "Don't drop the soap," or whatever. Yuck, yuck, hurr, hurr! I don't care if the guy is/was a criminal, whether he "deserves it," or what -- Whatever the purpose of prison is, I cannot abide by the seeming assumption that part of the punishment is going to be THAT, and WE ARE ALL SUPPOSED TO BE OKAY WITH IT.

And then there's the occasional "joke" reference to Deliverance that comes up whenever anything remotely related to Appalachia or Georgia ... or, depending upon the audience, practically ANYWHERE in "flyover country" (since it all seems to blur together when you're from the City) ... with "dueling banjos" and squealing like pigs and such. Etc.

And then there's anime. I ... eh ... okay, that's not books. We're talking about *books*, right? Finding examples in anime would be too easy. But it used to surprise me how much stuff would get through what I assumed to be mainstream channels (and for a while led to Gwendel REFUSING to watch any more anime unless a trusted friend of hers had vetted THE ENTIRE SERIES from beginning to end, lest there be any mid-series "surprises").

No, sadly, I'm just not surprised anymore that a published book that's gotten lots of attention happens to have a bit of "rape-joke" in it, and it gets a pass. I'm not HAPPY by any means, but certainly not surprised.

[skyflame.livejournal.com]

My favorite Christopher Moore book by far is "Lamb," which is also oddly the only book of his I've managed to finish. But "Lamb" is one of the funniest books I've ever read.