PREVIEWS |
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Various people were kind enough to road test The Perfect Fool for me. Here's what they said. "The kind of satisfaction the book gave did cause me to reminisce: A Confederacy of Dunces, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, All My Friends Are Going to be Strangers, The Mysterious Stranger. In particular, a book I hadn't thought about in many years came to mind, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, by Richard Farina. It is a tale whose issues thread back to Don Quixote, but freshly told. The faith (often portrayed as addled) that my generation had in coincidence, synchronicity, extreme decadence, and a vision nourished by a mystical buffet is vindicated." ABNER BURNETT "When
you pick up books by stand up comedians, you usually expect roughly
the same sort of thing - a first person romp which tries to balance
the stand up instinct for gag after gag with the author's ambition
to produce a proper literary work. It's a delicate balancing act and
one that's pretty hard to pull off successfully. Few succeed. In the
case of Perfect Fool, I started reading the book expecting
this sort of thing. Halfway through the first chapter I realised I
was going to have to go back and start again, shedding my preconceptions
along the way. It's a complex and subtle novel written with a love
of language and a baffling blend of plot lines. The characters are
warm and rich, whether appearing as cameos or protagonists, and the
humour is always present but never gets in the way of the story. It's
a proper novel and an excellent read." "It's
as though the bastard off-spring of the X-Files collided with a distant
cousin of Nick Hornby in a road movie directed by Wim Wenders to a
soundtrack by Roky Erickson in a plot financed by Freemasons. Smashing.
Great. Ineluctable." "I
slid down a tall metal frame on this book. It's a real rollercoaster
of a novel. Except smaller and made out of paper." "Stewart
Lee comes on with … a lending eye for detail and the verbal swagger
of a fish tailing jack rabbit." "..
gives life and intelligence to people who are usually just shapeless
forms in the background of more deserving types - hopeless rock 'n'roll
dreamers and street people. The squares wouldn't get it but the hipsters
will. Lets hope they don't all steal the book." "Hopi
Indian beliefs, Freemasonry, fundamentalist Christian comic books,
and the seedy side of life in Balham. And no lame jokes where the
narrator sets up a gag and the punchline in the same sentence. Yes
it's true - Stewart Lee is not the new Terry Pratchett or Douglas
Adams." "Stewart
Lee's first novel is a startling work full of vigor and verve, interweaving
the philosophical insights of a whizzened professor as he looks aghast
at modern society with the cinemascope sized imagination of the most
enthusiastic and daring film maker." "Lee's
characters bridge some kind of metaphysical Grand Canyon between London
and Arizona. His writing is precise, weird, dark and wondrous. Comic
moments appear at the most un-comical of moments. This book is mighty
fine." "Like
High Fidelity … on acid!' "At
last! Proof emphatic that our lives are bound not by fate but by bestial
porn, space cadets, complete chance and the late Robert Calvert of
Hawkwind fame…" "An
absurd allegorical tale incorporating love, lust, madness, obsession
and brilliantly observed melancholy in equal doses, reveals Lee to
have not only enough creative wit to maintain the pace across an entire
novel, but a distinctively original writing style - and one incorporating
enough rock'n'roll nouse to give Mr Hornby pause for thought..." "The
Perfect Fool is the sort of book you take to the lavatory and don't
come out until it's finished, and then with a triumphant flush, you
re-enter the world invigorated." "Lee
has successfully pulled off an impressively erudite debut, charting
the high-concept hi-jinks of a raggle-taggle of metaphysical misfits
with tenderness and charm. Their Odyssey from Balham to the badlands
is joyously funny and also strangely affecting." "Quite
an achievement in its complex melding of the mundane with the fantastic.
On one level we find a story concerning the various (mis)adventures
of a disparate dramatis personae of misfits. We meet a pair of washed-up
London musicians, a suspected serial killer, a native American indian,
an English mental patient who believes he was once an astronaut, a
forgotten psychedelic rock star, a bible toting wild west sheriff,
a hippie/tramp who accidentally torched a Ladbroke Grove crashpad,
and an unpleasant quartet of murderous priests and freemasons. On
another level we are presented with a parable based around the search
for our individual Holy Grail (symbolic or real, either applies here),
in which seemingly unrelated but parallel threads are skilfully drawn
together at a junkyard Camelot in the Arizona desert. Lee seems to
understand how co-incidence can be pre-destined just as pre-destiny
can be purely co-incidental, how the inconsequential can be squeezed
up against moments of staggering significance, and, greatest of all,
how the futility of life (yes, I really said that), is marked out
by its very purpose. Stewart Lee has created an uncomfortable, yet
frighteningly familiar world, populated by characters we must all
recognise. He has a sharp sense of the absurdity and obsession with
which its people occupy themselves. Make no mistake, though, despite
the plentiful wry observations, this is one comedian's novel which
is by no means a comedy. Whether or not it will modify the public's
perception of the author is an altogether different matter. Celebrity,
it seems, must be perpetually clad in the mantle in which it first
appeared. Maybe, just maybe, Comedian Stewart Lee will become known
as Novelist Stewart Lee, he certainly deserves to, but I fear that
his will be the recurring epitaph of the stranger that reads, 'Go
on then, tell us a joke.'. And though this is a tale in which dreams
are realised and burdens are shed, there is an amused world weariness
about it that makes me suspect Comedian/Novelist Stewart Lee would
have it no other way." "Best
known for the educated juvenilia of Fist Of Fun and This Morning With
Richard Not Judy, Stewart Lee eschews the standard matey prose of
a comic turned author to pen a novel that's short on laughs but high
in imagination and invention. Lee's personal love for obscure psychedelic
rock and religious obsessives comes to the fore, as he follows separate
groups of damaged nobodies unwittingly embroiled in a quest for the
Holy Grail. There are touches of Armistead Maupin in the use of synchronicity,
and the writing, while dense at times, is always bold and poetic.
A superior debut."
"I haven't read the book. I read the bit about the woman who
claims to be a serial killer and scares off the bloke with the hat.
That's all. So here's an appropriate quote. Stick my name under it.
"If Stewart Lee was fatter, shorter, uglier, posher and really, really,
really boring, The Perfect Fool would be a sure-fire Whitbread contender." "Stewart
Lee's The Perfect Fool is that rare thing, a more than decent novel
written by a comedian. The root of his success in this is precisely
that he doesn't strain to make the reader laugh but rather allows
the absurd scenarios he spins to follow their own logic and lets the
reader interpret them on whatever level he or she chooses. A scattered
collection of unfortunates and derelicts all reaching crisis point
in seemingly disparate unenlightened lives gradually come together
in Arizona as a consequence of their various half-understood quests.
It's a mixture of paranoid occult conspiracy, obsessive rock'n'roll
fandom, and deluded detective work. The stories entwine without contrivance
and though the relationships eventually seem obvious the skilful construction
ensures the joins never show, and nothing is crassly telegraphed.
From the rock'n'roller's point of view the lives of Sid and Danny,
trapped in their Dire Straits tribute band, hitching up their threadbare
dignity, posts a dreadful warning. There but for fortune... The musical
components ring true mainly because they are true, and though Luther
Peyote turns out not to quite be Roky Erickson the initial sense of
recognition is particularly warming." |
