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The Perfect FoolIt passes the quest

Stewart Lee shows he can do a lot more than comedy with his debut novel, The Perfect Fool

By Stephanie Merritt in The Observer Posted on Sunday, July 15th, 2001

It is an unwritten law that as surely as models will, sooner or later, attempt to bulk out their credentials by trying to become actresses, so TV comedians will eventually try their hand at writing novels. It seems grossly unfair, then, that, having already garnered fame, fortune and critical acclaim as a stand-up, half of a successful double act and, more recently, as a director, Stewart Lee should have produced such an ambitious, intricate and impressive novel at his first go.

The Perfect Fool seems to be set in a bizarre world where Iain Sinclair’s fiction melds with a Coen Brothers’ screenplay. His apparently disparate characters play out the beginnings of their separate dramas thousands of miles apart, until destiny, synergy, what you will, draws the threads together in a conjunction that is deliciously unpredictable in spite of the clues.

Danny and Sid, having lost their youth and their dreams of musical success, are now doomed to spend their nights smoking bad dope, watching illegal porn and living on the meagre wage afforded by their gigs in a Dire Straits cover band, the Sultans of Streatham. Their only solace is Sid’s collection of Luther Peyote albums, but the acid-rock legend disappeared in the Seventies and has never been heard of since.

Across London, the amnesiac Mr Lewis thinks he once carried the Holy Grail into space, while the enigmatic Hampstead Man stalks him on behalf of the Freemasons. Obsessive fundamentalist Sheriff Hopkins has been tracking a serial killer across Arizona for 15 years, while former porn star Tracy is on the run from a trail of suicidal lovers. Bob Nequatewa is a Hopi Indian clown, the perfect fool of the title and the magus figure of the novel.

How these characters eventually coincide, at an abandoned air base in the Arizona desert, defies synopsis in so short a space. While the narrative voice – each storyline continued in the present tense, underlining the parallel co-existence of these as-yet-unconsciously linked lives – varies little in tone, Lee manages to foster a sympathy and curiosity for each of his characters, keeping his various plates spinning until enough details crystallise to hook the reader on the emerging pattern.

All his characters are engaged in some kind of quest whose ultimate goal is to give a purpose to a spiritually barren existence; as with the knights errant of the original Grail legends, the quest requires a journey, battles, tasks. People encountered along the way may not be what they seem, with the exception of Sid and Danny, who provide the novel’s comic relief. But there is a deeper note beneath the humour; both Sid and Mr Lewis recognise, in different ways, that it is the quest itself and not the Grail that lends a sense of purpose and that dreams usually disappoint.

Written by Stephanie Merritt in The Observer on 15th July 2001. Filed Under: Book, Reviews, The Perfect Fool
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