carolhoggart's review
4.0
This is possibly the weirdest, most brilliant and downright hilarious book I've ever read. Norminton takes a Hieronymus Bosch painting (the titular Ship of Fools) as his starting point and peoples it with Canterbury Tales style characters, each of whom has a 'Prologue' and a 'Tale' to tell. Just as in Chaucer, some of the tales are bawdy and others are sweetly melancholic. All the tales, however, are allegorical - which makes for dense reading at times. In fact, I was constantly dogged by the nagging feeling that I just don't GET it and that I am perforce quite stupid. Perhaps this is why I gave the book a mere 4 star rating. My conscience tells me that The Ship of Fools deserves 5, if not 7 or 8 twinklers but, damn it, who likes to be made to feel slow on the uptake? And allegory is so fourteenth century.
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