LORD MALQUIST & MR MOON

by Tom Stoppard

Paperback

Genres: Fiction, British Literature, Humor, Fantasy, Novels, Plays, Drama

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

Sir Tom Stoppard was a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter. He has written for film, radio, stage, and television, finding prominence with plays. His work covers the themes of human rights, censorship, and political freedom, often delving into the deeper philosophical thematics of society. Stoppard has been a playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation. He was knighted for his contribution to theatre by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997.

Born in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard left as a child refugee, fleeing imminent Nazi occupation. He settled with his family in Britain after the war, in 1946, having spent the previous three years (1943–1946) in a boarding school in Darjeeling in the Indian Himalayas. After being educated at schools in Nottingham and Yorkshire, Stoppard became a journalist, a drama critic and then, in 1960, a playwright.

Stoppard's most prominent plays include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974), Night and Day (1978), The Real Thing (1982), Arcadia (1993), The Invention of Love (1997), The Coast of Utopia (2002), Rock 'n' Roll (2006) and Leopoldstadt (2020). He wrote the screenplays for Brazil (1985), Empire of the Sun (1987), The Russia House (1990), Billy Bathgate (1991), Shakespeare in Love (1998), Enigma (2001), and Anna Karenina (2012), as well as the HBO limited series Parade's End (2013). He directed the film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), an adaptation of his own 1966 play, with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth as the leads.

He has received numerous awards and honours including an Academy Award, a Laurence Olivier Award, and five Tony Awards. In 2008, The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 11 in their list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture". It was announced in June 2019 that Stoppard had written a new play, Leopoldstadt, set in the Jewish community of early 20th-century Vienna. The play premiered in January 2020 at Wyndham's Theatre. The play went on to win the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play and later the 2022 Tony Award for Best Play.

Reviews

[kira · Rating 2 out of 5]

this book began with an introduction by the author noting that it wasn't very popular. upon reading, it's easy to see why

[Nick Douglas · Rating 2 out of 5]

In the intro to the 2005 edition, Stoppard marvels that someone's still around every few decades to publish this, and that it was ever read at all. He gets as close as morally possible to recommending that the reader put down the book and walk away.

So of course I read the whole thing, because it's great to see that a writer you revere was also capable of frivolous bullshit, especially if you want to be a writer too. And this wasn't even a "before his prime" kind of work; it was published around the same time as the first production of "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead."

So if you ever find yourself writing bullshit, and you think you've regressed, don't worry. Just read this, as far as you can make it anyway, and then get on with writing "The Real Inspector Hound."

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Imagine Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent as rewritten by the Monty Python troupe and set in London of the mid 1960s. This is, to date, Stoppard’s only novel and it was first published in 1966, a year after the passing of Winston Churchill and the same year Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was produced. After a dizzying opening when all the major characters are introduced as if in quite different novels, we learn that the titular characters have a business relationship, Lord Malquist hires Mr. Moon to be his Boswell, to capture his unique perspective on a world that is post-heroic (there is a state funeral, The Funeral of the Year, that is a key backdrop to the novel) and now launched upon an age when style is everything and Lord Malquist is nothing if not stylish.

He keeps a falcon and walks his pet lion in Hyde Park. He conducts an affair with Mrs. Moon, whom Mr. Moon believes a virgin but who also seems to run something very like a brothel. There is a French maid, two cowboys on horses with six-shooters in their holsters (though rarely for long), an Irish carriage driver who appears to be from Africa not Ireland, a man on a donkey who claims to be the Risen Christ but speaks with the thickest of stage-Irish brogues, and various acquaintances, clients, attendants, creditors, and disguised police officers hunting for terrorists.

Lord Malquist is offended by the modern world but non-plussed by it as well. Ignore it with style. He does, even as the world has a hard time ignoring him—his horse-drawn carriage runs over pedestrians and his pet lion gets free now and again with consequence. Mr. Moon finds the modern world hateful, oppressively tall and crowded. He is working on a history of the world and recording the thoughts and observations of Lord Malquist in a journal. Plus, he has a bomb that he intends to explode at the right moment as an act of protest. Malquist finds the world meaningless and Moon wants to believe his protest will be meaningful. Both are uniquely selfish with world views that serve the selfishness.

Stoppard’s comic talent is on full laugh-out-loud display: witty, perfectly timed puns, word play, and punch lines drop with Astaire-like choreography. Like the British monarchy, Lord Malquist is at times charming and at time appalling, just as Mr. Moon is woeful and pathetic, eliciting sympathy for his woebegone life even though he has this horrific intention that he may not have the competence to pull off. An inspired farce, Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon reads like a play or filmscript, making it a quick and very lively read. It is not political satire, like Swift or, more recently, Martin McDonagh (The Lieutenant of Inishmore) but more a comedy of the absurd. There is not a whole lot of meat here but it is well-cooked and delightfully served.

[DoctorM · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book I read in the L&B Room at Sterling Library at Yale a lifetime ago. Remembering where I read it matters. Gray March day, scarf draped over a chair back, a battered hardcover copy. I was already a Stoppard fan, but I'd never heard of "Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon" 'til that morning. All these years later, it's still a book that makes me laugh--- silly in that sly Oxbridge way, tart, and very funny. Not Stoppard's best work--- it's his first professional piece ---but it's a book I'm glad is still in print. And, yes, I rather do admire Lord Malquist. But you knew I would, didn't you?

[Devon Flaherty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Plays 5 (or Plays FIve), a compilation of five of Tom Stoppard plays, published by faber and faber in 1999. Also, Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon, by Tom Stoppard, from Grove Press, published first in 1966 and with an introduction in 2005.

Note that I have recently reviewed Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Stoppard’s most famous work, as part of a study of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and that is why I took this diverting route into some of the further works of Stoppard. I also reviewed the incredible movie (directed by Stoppard), Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead.

Stoppard is not your typical playwright, in career. He has exactly the type or career that I would love to have, in that he is never satisfied just sticking to one thing. His production includes not only many plays (and many celebrated plays, beginning with radio plays and expanding to the stage), but also screen plays (some original and some adaptations), movie direction, translation, and even acting, libretto, and a novel. It would take me an entire “semester,” as it were, to cover Stoppard in his entirety, hitting on all his best plays and watching his movies. Here are some of the most famous (far from comprehensive):

Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon (novel, 1966)
“Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead” (play, 1966)
“The Real Inspector Hound” (play, 1968)
“Jumpers” (play, 1972)
“Travesties” (play, 1974)
“Every Good Boy Deserves Favour” (play, 1977)
“Professional Foul” (TV play, 1977)
“Doggs Hamlet” and “Cahoot’s Macbeth” (companion plays, 1979)
“The Real Thing” (play, 1982)
“Arcadia” (play, 1983)
Brazil (screenplay, 1985)
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (screenplay rewrite, 1989)
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (movie, 1990)
Shakespeare In Love (screenplay, 1998)
“The Coast of Utopia” (play trilogy, 2002)
Parade’s End (adapted TV miniseries, 2012)
Anna Karenina (adapted screenplay, 2012)

Stoppard is a Czech-born British playwright. His career and works have been applauded and revered since the 60s, and he continues to be an artistic force. He was knighted in 1997. Under his belt, he has an Academy Award and four Tonys, as well as many other awards. He outperforms almost every other living dramatist, and in the words of Wikipedia, Stoppard’s “themes [include] human rights, censorship and political freedom… along with exploration of linguistics and philosophy.” He is also recognized as a comic and satirical master.

Plays 5 or Plays Five:

When deciding on a book of plays to read for Stoppard, I was confronted with many, but none with all his plays, and not one with his best or most famous. In other words, you just have to pick a random or chronological grouping of up to five of his plays and begin there. I really think a Complete Works or Best Of is much needed. So, somehow I ended up choosing from the definitive series of books (titled Plays 1, Plays 2, Plays 3, Plays 4, and Plays 5), the compilation Plays 5. I would have liked to also read “Travesties” and “Jumpers,” but my pocketbook could not afford two more books, nor could my reading schedule absorb it.

Stoppard’s most lauded play from Plays 5 is “Arcadia,” and I have to whole-heartedly agree with that standing. It is debatable which is better: “Arcadia” or “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead.” (I emphatically vote the latter.) One of the best things about Stoppard as a playwright is his inventiveness. In “Arcadia,” the action takes place in the same house, 180 years apart, so Stoppard chooses not to change sets between scenes and props become part of the unfolding story on two levels. It is quite cool. Other than that, the play is enjoyable because of the many thoughts and one-liners. The play is ultimately about order and disorder and true knowledge versus conviction, and feature two generations of academics, artist, and scientists.

The rest of the plays in Plays 5 range from almost great to pretty darn good. All of them include that Stoppard inventiveness, quick wit, and complicated meta-narrative (which went over my head more often than not, I am afraid). “The Real Thing” unfolds at first very straight-forwardly, then the reader (viewer) becomes confused, only to be pleasantly surprised by the revelation of a play-within-a-play. From then on, the reader doesn’t know what to expect, and the plot twists and turns back on itself several times, making difficult scenes poignant. The theme is fidelity and infidelity, especially when coupled with fame. “Night and Day” is my least favorite in the book, partly because of its themes of colonialism and journalism, but also because Stoppard’s device of having a second “Ruth” character speak for her thoughts was–in my opinion–a complete flop. It was too random and convoluted, let alone confusing, to work well. Perhaps in the hands of a capable director… “Indian Ink” covers yet another favorite British topic, India and its relationship with England. Also included: artists. (See a theme? I’m not sure Stoppard ever writes about anything but the artists, rich, famous, or aristocratic.) Stoppard also used a device similar to that in “Arcadia,” where scenes move back and forth between the last months of the main character’s life and her sister’s telling of the story to a biographer, although these scenes do not take place in the same setting and props do change, at least sort of. The characters are interesting, but it lacks a compelling plot line. “Hapgood,” I hate to say, is just too confusing. I think it is about twins, but there is something there below the surface that we are supposed to get. Actually, it reminded me a lot of “Fringe,” which is a J. J. Abrams TV show about alternate universes and double agents, so yeah, they have similarities. If I had ever understood what was going on or which character was whom, I believe the twists and turns would have been fun.

Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon:

From the plays, I went on to read Stoppard’s only novel, Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon. As to whether or not I liked it, I am going to have to answer two times. One: no. It was just too crass and filled with sex and sexual innuendo and it also pokes fun at my religion. Two: yes. It is exactly the kind of fantastical story that I look for and enjoy, complete with twists and turns and fast-paced plot and interesting characters and a giant mess of strings that come banging together at the end to create a satisfying explosion. I am saddened by the fact that this novel has never received much attention or sales or awards. As I often feel with Stoppard, I am likely missing a whole lot of satire wound up in his story, but what I do catch I find great fun. An awesome book, if you don’t mind crassness or religious satire, and especially if you are British. Just check out the other two reviews that exist on Amazon. They are so few but they are glowing. On the other hand, a quick look at GoodReads leads you to a hundred-person mash between disappointed fans and people–like me–who love it and wish he would write more novels.

Movies:

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). Stoppard wrote the final draft of this screenplay, which just means that taste is… um… magnetic. In other words, I have liked Stoppard for much longer than I have realized. The Last Crusade is one of my most favorite movies of all time. I can’t imagine there are many of you who have not seen it. It is not high-minded or anything, but it is a truly classic adventure movie, the best of the trilogy. Be prepared for some gore.

Shakespeare In Love (1998). This movie has a lot of fans, and had a lot of buzz when it came to Oscar time in 1999. (It took some home.) As a teenage Shakespeare fan at the time, I recall being quite disappointed. According to IMDB, though, people who liked this movie also like Love Actually, About a Boy, and Sliding Doors, three of my other favorite movies. (They are all on my shelf, as you read.) Perhaps I should give this another view?

Anna Karenina (2012). I already reviewed this in a month recap, so here is the old review: “This one was the opposite of Les Miserables in that it impressed me when I did not expect to be impressed. I was honestly expecting it to be sort of sordid, but it wasn’t as bad as it looked on the previews. So then why was I watching? In the mood for something sordid? I consider Anna Karenina, the book, to be like a Russian cousin to the Jane Austen-esque novels, and while I have enjoyed those over the years (and many of their movies), I have never been able to get through Anna (the novel). I seem to get bored reading Russian lit. So I wanted to like it and to get a feel for the Karenina story. What I was happy to discover–contrary to where I thought the novel was headed when I have tried to read it–was that the movie did not simper around Anna’s liberation as a sexual being and a woman. Sure, she’s passionate and strong-willed and part of a restrictive society, but she is also selfish and stands in stark contrast to the calmer, more sacrificial love of Levin and Kitty. We aren’t convinced, in the end, that she is the best mom (understatement) and we also agree with Anna that her husband, the forgiver and loyalist, is the better person. Also… the movie is done so that you are acutely aware of the movie as creation; plenty of times the acting takes place in a theater set, characters passing between acts. I’m not really sure why the director took this direction [I do now; Tom Stoppard wrote it], but it was beautiful and reminded me a lot of Baz Luhrman.”

Stay tuned for reviews of Parade’s End by Ford Maddox Ford along with Stoppard’s TV adaptation, and also Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” which is supposed to be related in style and theme to Stoppard’s works.

***REVIEW WRITTEN FOR THE STARVING ARTIST BLOG.

[Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some flashes of what makes Stoppard great, but only that. It's amazing that he wrote this about the same time as R&G are Dead, but he thought this was the better work and had more potential. We see ourselves through a glass darkly.

[Ernie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Stoppard himself gives one of the most helpful introductions to this 2005 edition of his 1966 publication if which he claims the publisher said that he would publish and be dammed. Written in 'those happy days' of the early sixties when Stoppard was also writing Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, he then had more hope for this novel than the play which opened at the Edinburgh Festival and rightly secured his fame as a playwright.

He confesses his fondness for the then fashionable concept of the spectator as hero and I found the first half of the book straining for effect. As in his plays, here he is best with his anarchic, Monty Python like humour. Moon, his leading character is attending the ninth earl Marquist, having been hired to give Boswellian services to record the daily life of the demented earl. Stoppard enjoys heaping on the anachronisms of the British aristocracy by placing the action around the earl's London palace, his club and the royal environs of Hyde Park Rotten Row during the time of the state funeral of the national hero, presumably Churchill. The earl with his falcon and pet mountain lion travels in his coach and pair through the contemporary London traffic, guided by a black Irish coachman who is unable to pull up the horses when they bolt and run down a woman because of the lion's taste for flamingo. Moon always carries a round bomb which is not yet activated but the second half of the book is enlivened by the sense that the bomb is now ticking. At the time of the Cuban missile crisis, this would have had an even more anarchic force.
When another character, the Risen Christ enters on an ass, the writing is taken over by the kind of sparkling dialog that I enjoy in Stoppard's plays. there are boudoir and bathroom scenes, too many cut feet as Waiting for Godot, Hamlet and T S Eliot are all there and the French maid hides under the Chesterfield when two armed cowboys ride in and two bodies are smuggled out of the palace in a rolled up rug. The text is full of enjoyable throwaway lines: the donkey may have provoked the lion 'possibly by its asinine expression'; 'idealism is the thin edge of madness'; Ireland is 'a country celebrated entirely for its refugees'...as I turned the pages more quickly as other coach rides threaten the state funeral and led towards the suitably anarchic climax.

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cyclical.

[Brett · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extremely enjoyable reading experience, Tom Stoppard can deliver absurdity as few others can. This, Stoppard's only novel, is closer to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead than Shakespeare in Love, and is filled with characters that see the universe only through their own collosal egomania. It is enormously funny and philosophical, and even has a few touching moments of unreality thrown in. Somewhat scattered at the outset, Stoppard picks up steam in the last half of the novel as he moves toward the conclusion of the story.

Stoppard belongs to that very small and special class of writer than deftly turns the unending tragedy and confusion of the world into an anarchic, comic spectacle. He reminds us how little we know, and that we don't even really know many of the things we think we do. Though Rosencrantz and Guildenstern will remain his most lasting impact on literature, Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon deserves to be read and respected in its own right.

[Travis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unsurprisingly, this is a very clever book. It has the feel of a theatrical farce (in a good way,) with outsized caricatures of characters doing outrageous things, barely stopping to notice the horrible things that seem to be happening to everyone around them. It reminded me very much of Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead in that the protagonist, Mr. Moon, spends the majority of his time confusedly and scientifically trying to grasp a single answer for the workings of the universe, remaining almost completely oblivious to the disasters building around him (although he is just slightly more, er...livious than everyone else.) It almost seems as if Mr. Moon is slowly catching the sickness of sanity in the middle of an insane world. A very strange and funny book. I may have underrated it.

[H]

(Borzoi / Knopf: 1966)

The technical and human complexity of the machine shook on the edge of disintegration, held together only by everyone else's unawareness of the fact. It was an obvious fact and Moon did not know (39) why he alone should have to bear the burden of it. He only knew that it was so. In a film cartoon when someone runs off the edge of a cliff he goes on running in mid-air for a few yards; only when he looks down and becomes aware does he drop. Moon had looked down and seen the abyss. (40)

[junajuna · Rating 3 out of 5]

As many reviewers have noted, the best part of the 2005 edition is Stoppard's comical introduction. The gist of the intro is essentially, "Hey, readers, this novel was commissioned during the beginning of the height of my fame; I didn't necessarily have anything to say." That probably says it all. What I will say is that the beginning of this novel is tough and I did enjoy it more the longer I stuck with it. Ultimately, though, the book was a struggle for me and I'm not entirely sure what to take away from it.

[Venkat]

Read through this during my school days!! (Yeah I was a pretentious snob those days). Trying to relocate this mad mad book. I didnt even knew who Tom Stoppard was.

I found a (Hardbound)copy of this novel in the district central library in Salem (Tamilnadu) (Of all places in Salem!!) and read around 120 pages.

Truly the one book I am haunted by. The Risen Christ just wont leave me alone.

[Julia Roll · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the weirdest books I've ever read. Despite the somewhat confusing story it had some interesting and even funny moments, though but I now can say with certainty that like Stoppard better as a playwright.

[Ryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

My least favorite of all of Stoppard's plays, but it deserves more than 2 stars...2.5 would be right for me.

[Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

quirky.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Stoppard, and was excited to read the first thing he ever wrote professionally. it was only a little disappointing, so I'm happy with the whole experience.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bit more subtext than actual text, still thoroughly good read.

[Kadri · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strange and unexpected. I could relate to Mister Moon as he injured almost every part of his body in about 24 hours....

[Sam-Omar Hall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stoppard: sassy, sensitive, serious, surreal silliness. Sublime.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was very excited for this, despite the prevailing dispraise for it, and its, probably consequent, obscurity in Stoppard’s oeuvre. And its opening boded well, plus there was a very moving and trenchant passage of inner dialogue where Moon debates with himself over the existential debauchery of the modern world (“I don’t know a single person who is completely honest, or even half honest, and they don’t know it because dishonesty is now a matter of degree, and sincerity is something to be marketed and hunger is a statistic and expediency is god and the white rhino is begin wiped out for the racket in bogus aphrodisiacs!”). But the whole was too surrealistic for me, and that is a recipe for discomfort where I’m concerned – plus much too much hinged on a sex scene, though I didn’t find that altogether too surprising, neither for the author, nor for the time. I don’t go in for the revivification plot – how I am henceforth christening the use of arousal as a life-enamoring plot twist. In the end I found myself speeding through this on the encouragement that the thickness of the paper in my hardback exaggerated how much I had left to go. Three stars, rounded up from 2.5 for the quality of the prose, which was commendably creative and intelligent.

[Khoreutees · Rating 1 out of 5]

I bounced off this rather. It felt as though it was trying to be deep without really having anything to say, trying to be funny, but leaning heavily to the random-is-funny side of things, and trying to be provocative by going 'look sex'. Possibly if I had read it at a different point in my life I would have found something interesting, but at this point it just struck me as shallow and annoyingly misogynistic - the female characters roles comprise in their entirety of having sex with people, desiring to have sex with people, dying, and being the objects of men's sexual fantasies (including while dead). The only remotely sympathetic characters is the whole thing are the lion and the donkey and the lion is the only one that shows any sense - spending most of the book trying to run away from the human characters.

[elstaffe · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.5 rounds up reluctantly to 2 stars. I kind of want to track down the newer editions some reviewers reference just to read Stoppard's mea culpa about this book. It's never a good sign when a book is teaching you new racial slurs (although if anyone can, a British author writing in the 1960s has got my vote). The blurb on the back cover describes this as a dark comedy, but it wasn't particularly funny. The only line that approached comedy for me is excerpted below.

Pull quote/note
"On our right is the house of the Duke of Wellington, on our left a statue of Achilles, both reminders of the importance of boots." (154)

[Дмитрий Лобанов · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book reminds me Brothers Cohen and Adam Douglas. It is nice novel in the middle of 20th century setting.
Before reading it in native language, please, read translation in your native language. It is written, I guess, in best traditions of Lewis Carol and, of course, William Shakespeare. Well, all English plays and novels are ancestors of William.

[B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading the introduction and glancing through a few reviews I thought the book was going to be incomprehensible nonsense. It wasn't. It was a pleasant stroll through the absurd. But I could have done without the racism. Perhaps it had an intentional point but I failed to see it.

[Peter Reczek · Rating 2 out of 5]

A typical British farce. Take off of Don Quixote set in turn of the century London. Reads like a play. I love Stoppards plays but this novel should have been left dormant on the shelves.

[Salvatore · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a romp! Lots of fun to read and roam around in.

[Simon Prince · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not as bad as the author suggests but definitely not his finest work either.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Moon's anxiety is relatable. But what happened to his bomb?

[Jack Richards · Rating 1 out of 5]

not good at all