I always intend to read some Stoppard beyond Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, and had thought that his output was restricted to plays. Turns out, though, that he wrote at least one novel, and it's a slightly deranged pleasure. The events it portrays are pretty surreal, and the deadpan, matter-of-fact way in which it's written increases the reader's uneasy, vaguely inexplicable feeling that things aren't quite lined up as they should be. Reminded me of Iris Murdoch's novels - wordily droll and lightly but substantially philosophical in the same breath, and touched by a sense of oddness and absurdity (not to mention written in the sixties).
The process by which I came to read Lord Malquist & Mr Moon was as follows: I took the book from the shelf (in the library), opened it randomly, and my eye fell upon the line "So you carry this bomb about with you expressly for the purpose of throwing it at someone?". After that, it was a foregone conclusion that I'd take the book home to read.
Happily, that chance phrase turned out to be not unrepresentative of the book as a whole - it's Moon who carries the bomb around with him all the time, with the vague but over-analysed thought that its detonation might serve as some kind of Statement about the state of the world, but his interactions with his wife Jane, Lord Malquist, Lady Malquist, the two cowboys competing for the love of Moon's wife, the 'Risen Christ' (complete with donkey), Marie the French maid (unfortunately deceased), the General her 'admirer' (also unfortunately deceased), Mr and Mrs Cuttle the anarchists (the latter also unfortunately deceased), O'Hara the black (Irish) coachman, and of course Rollo the lion (plus one unfortunate flamingo), provide just as much joy as Moon's inner musings.
There's a real philosophical heft to the novel, too - grappling with society and the place of the alienated individual within it, and particularly with that universal condition of absurdity (overtones of French existentialism). But it does so in a way which is unfailingly unintrusive, and grounded in a recognisably real (if distorted) setting, so that the overall effect is something like a completely mental version of chinese water torture - drip, drip, drip - except, of course, less torturous. I suppose I mean that the novel itself is philosophical (and specifically existential, in at least some sense) rather than merely being about philosophy or existentialism. It really is.
