SOURCE: “Moor Means Worse,” in New Statesman & Society, December 2, 1994, pp. 38–39.

In the following review, Cheyette offers a generally positive assessment of Moo Pak.

The title of Gabriel Josipovici's 11th novel [Moo Pak] is a child's rendition of Moor Park, now a secondary school, where Jonathan Swift originally wrote A Tale of a Tub. While in residence at Moor Park, Swift met the eight-year-old Esther Johnson, known as Stella, who eventually became the love of his life. The subsequent history of Moor Park—as a lunatic asylum or an institute for research into primates—is alluded to throughout the novel.

But this work is not about Moor Park in any straightforward sense. The house is used as an extended metaphor for that which combines the unkept or natural world of the “moor” with the cultivated “parks” of the novel's London setting. Josipovici is fascinated by Swift precisely because his...