I found Pocket to be an interesting character, although he dresses in the motley of a fool and appears to be a court jester he is too smart for his own good, always letting his mouth run before him and yet for all his uncouthness and bawdiness he is fairly engaging as well. Unfortunately along with meddling with the romantic life of one of the Senators daughters (he helped Desdemona marry Othello) Pocket is also caught up in a plot of intrigue and murder. Pocket is in Venice to stop the formation of a crusade by appealing to the Doge and the Senate that this would be wrong. There is a slight crossover between this book and Fool but there is enough exposition in this book that it will not matter if you read Fool before or after the Serpent of Venice. The main character though is a Fool called Pocket, who is a character of the author’s earlier book called Fool. (I can't tell if the Chorus was over- or underused, but the running joke of this narrator's obviousness wasn't as funny or clever as Art Garfunkel's appearance in an episode of Arthur.As you may have guessed The Serpent of Venice is set in Venice and mixes characters from three of Shakespeare’s plays: The Merchant of Venice, Othello and King Lear. Moore even threw in a rarely seen but always annoying Chorus that added little to the story.
I was looking forward to Pocket's impish insights, but they were often broken up with chapters of omniscient narration - wonderfully written, mind you, just not as fun to read. It is the shifts in points of view, though, that frustrated this fan.
The cast of characters is drawn from both of these famous plays, and if that wasn't enough "history" to tackle, Moore adds a disappointingly brief cameo of Marco Polo, whose appearance feels forced, like much of the plot. The setting is a mashup of Othello and The Merchant of Venice, with a dash of Poe. Pocket has been sent to Venice by his queen, Cordelia, to stop a war, and he quickly finds himself caught in multiple revenge schemes. Which is where The Serpent of Venice falls short: The story is not told entirely by Pocket.
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