The Feast of Fools

by John David Morley

In a contemporary love story set in Munich that echoes the Greek myth of Persephone, a woman abandons her husband for six months to be with her lover, creating chaos that is only resolved with her return

Genres: Fantasy

443 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Diane Lunasea · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my very favorite novels. Set in the city of Münich, which is really one of the characters of the book. Structured around an older time's ritual-year calendar, in which the Feast of Fools figures. Mythological and archetypal themes and characters (featuring Persephone and Hades) play out their destinies in the modern-day story, with the layers of older ways of thinking/living coloring our view of their progress through the narrative. One of the most enjoyable aspects of this book for me comes from the different voices used as the chapters are narrated or sometimes, what? – hosted? – by different characters. So in the go-go photographer's chapter, we read the story in his language, which is full of slang and dash. In the young lover's chapters, the feeling of the story changes to reflect his internal world, as expressed in his language. As the story unfolds, we inhabit shifting perspectives, an experience deepened by the shifting use of language. One of the pleasures I found in reading this book was in entering the web of social relationships, centered around one family and their friends, and spread across different fields of endeavor around the city. Favorite episodes include the Great Fog, the Carnival season with the visitors from Venice, the fruit harvesting... Another pleasure for me lies in the exploration of the flavors of experience in relationship, including agonizing desire, hope, and romantic beginnings; abiding love despite frustration; what happens when dissatisfaction reaches a breaking point, and how communication and renegotiation takes place in estrangement; familial bonds of loyalty; temporary retreats into inward explorations, while carrying on inside the container of partnership, varieties of sexual tastes and behaviors... Morley illustrates and uses many flavors and ways to be in relationship as one vehicle for the narrative, this layer being a big strata of the age-old, endlessly-told, story itself. For a while, I read this book every autumn, and had to make myself stop so it would be fun to read another year...

[Left Coast Justin · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first time Harold saw Dotty, he fell out of a tree. Among other plot lines over hundreds of pages, he cluelessly pursues her, until he finally figures out what to do:

Woke to whiteness in the morning. Snow had come overnight, powdering a smatter on roofs, transposing the shadows, keying to brilliance the light reflected from the ceiling of the room.

I asked if she was asleep and she said yes. She rolled over on her back, vanilla overlaying lavender, and murmured sleepily that she would not in principle object if I molested her a little. So while she snoozed I began to browse, from the collar-bone down, through her proper nouns, and when I felt I was deep enough into the corn I mentioned fairly offhandedly that I'd never actually slept with a woman. I half expected she'd be surprised, and she was. I could feel her body sort of stiffen. She told me to come up from under the covers. I told her I'd rather she came down. Above the covers there was pause for thought. I could feel her thinking about that one, too. Then her body suppled and [she] came sliding down...
--What do you think of? -- Rain.--Rain?--Lying naked on the grass and being rained on. -- That sounds nice...
before I had time to think about what we'd do next she was on top of me, splashing me with kisses and breasts and already she'd put me inside her, her body arched under the covers, spanned over me like a tent, her face in the tent light brimming, brimming, until I ran over and rained on her, miraculously, upwards.

.

This is the kind of writing Mr. Morley is capable of, and the type of tight, descriptive, enjoyable prose I remember from Pictures from the Water Trade and Ella Morris. Unfortunately, in this book, his second novel, he also indulged himself in page after page of unreadable dreck, one example of which:

Druids being delivered by the busload, see. Grizzles trogging on sticks and gargoyles doomed in dodo gear. Weenies, skimpering, still in short wear, and dons with jemmies moneyed out in flash wraps for the Saturday night gloat. Ho ho.
A meisje tettered by on high-heeled toots, her milkshakes churning in full swing.
Scorch!
--Doo do dah duh di da doo ba ba pa--
Sliep drum his chips, tip-tap with his shovels. Eelctronic melody tinkle. He check his wrist. Longines show her pussy with parted shanks at eight o'clock. Lucas, lord of Saturday night? Selfsame, with luscious green curls. Power, eh. Sex. Gload. Razzle in wallet, trunchion rodding in leggings. Video of that meisje with the quadruple milkshakes did it. Hero lit a menthol dreg and spread his muscled shanks. Feel tall, feel very very good, almost like that bimbo on atomic yacht in sexy dreg ad. Fuck Miss Bloomquist. File expenses and call it grief. Change of wear in chariot. Purple shovels, silk Valentino spic. Drain a Drambuie and tune up on sonics in Cafe Megalomania. Con over likely clefts, dairymaids with long golden gloss etc etc. Scoop same and dither to unresisting swoon in disco dreamland prior to trojan shafting.

I almost wish the book had been horrible all the way through, so I could have just cast it aside. But I actually came to care if the mother of twins and her husband would reconcile, if the woman who fled on her wedding day would find happiness, and if the clueless twenty-year old guy would....well, you know how that one turned out.