Jester (with comments on Majordomo)
By Tim Carter
Majordomo originally reviewed here.
Author Tim Carter recently won the second instalment of the SFINCS novella competition with his book Majordomo, featuring a crippled kobold overseeing the demesne of The Dark Lord<tm>. As part of one of the teams judging the competition, I can confirm both that Majordomo is a masterpiece, and that there arte definitely parallels to Jester – even if they’re entirely its own separate stories. You do not need to have read Majordomo to enjoy Jester, or the other way around.
The point I’m building up to is that it will be difficult to review Jester without comparing it to Majordomo, so I won’t pretend to try. I’ll try not to go overboard with it, though. The two books are, after all, unrelated to each other – they may not even play out in the same setting; there’s no overlap other than the prevalence of fantasy races and magical monsters, so it’s impossible to say for sure.
The other big thing the books have in common is the status of the main character. In Majordomo, Jack is a crippled kobold. In Jester, Shelly is a goblin slave tasked with keeping the latrines clean. Both of them sit on the muddy ground beneath the lowest rung on the ladder of social standing.
Here’s where the two stories begin to differ. Jack, from Majordomo, has an important and clearly defined role in his own circles outside of the public eye. He has pride, knowledge, and authority. Shelly, on the other hand, has nothing. When the story begins, he’s just about to to get his first taste of taking pride in achieving something. Jack is what Shelly might be in another ten or twenty years – if he survives that long, of course.
After all, he is a goblin.
He’s just a slave, tasked with cleaning up shit. What can he do, really?
A grave threat looms over Halfsock, where Shelly slaves (I initially wrote it’s where he lives, but I’m not sure you can really call it living in his case), and every attempt by the humans in charge to deal with said threat is thwarted by greed, prejudice, in-fighting, laziness, or just plain old stupidity.
Fortunately, Shelly is still quite clever, or at least clever enough not to be blinded by prejudice. He knows what he is, and he knows no one will listen to him if he tries to warn them, much less tell them what to do. Instead, much of the story is about trying to manipulate people who are more powerful, but less competent, without them noticing.
There’s death and betrayal, schemes and intrigues. Murder most foul.
Also worth noticing is that while the above might seem grim and dark, and while the underlying themes are serious, Jester is a light-hearted and funny story. Unfortunately, much of the humour didn’t work for me, but since I enjoyed the humorous aspect of Majordomo, I’m going to assume that it’s due to my sense of humour rather than any issue with the story or the writing.
So, how does Jester compare to Majordomo?
In short: I prefer Majordomo.
What elevates Majordomo to excellence is the relationships between the characters, in particular that between Jack and his master. Majordomo has a warmth that wasn’t present in Jester and that I dearly missed. In Majordomo, we encounter older characters that have a long history together, and we catch a glimpse of deep and developed friendships.
In Jester, Shelly is at the beginning of his career. He’s starting out from scratch and relationships are created and built within the pages of the story. There’s definitely a growth and warmth of character, but it’s not quite the same.
What I’ll whine about
The beginning. I already mentioned that the comedy aspect of Jester didn’t work for me, and I felt like much of the start of the story hinged on using humour to establish Shelly’s absolutely miserable position as a latrine slave. This isn’t to say that the start of the book is full of poop jokes, but rather that it took quite a while for me to get invested and start caring about what happened.
The latrine slave experience comes up again a few times, and I get that it’s a major part of Shelly’s backstory, but these are still the weakest scenes in the book. There’s a lot of focus on how disgusting and miserable it is, and perhaps my mind detached in self-defence, but the descriptions never really came alive to me.
What I’ll gush about
The concept. The idea of having someone who’s at the absolute bottom of everything, like Shelly, be the hero is intriguing. It’s like the farm boy who becomes the king, but taken to the comedy extreme, kind of. The farm boy gets all kinds of support and benefits that Shelly doesn’t get, and where the farm boy eventually steps into the limelight, Shelly keeps having to hide in the shadows.
Also, there’s no prophecy. It’s all Shelly.
Final Words
Jester is a tale of the hero who can never be The Hero, except to the people who knows what he really did.
