Gentlemen of the Road

Michael Chabon manages to both amaze and annoy on a regular basis. Navigating his dense prose suggests something akin to Odysseus as he made his way past Skylla and Karybdis. Or perhaps the Sirens are a better example since they are enticing much in the way that Chabon's novels are. Among other things, he has taken on Sherlock Holmes, comic books, and professional writers and college, all of which are quite dear to my heart. And like the Sirens, he deftly manages to suck you in via temptation before you realize that he's secretly out to drown you. The man is the William Faulkner of the 21st century. Ernest Hemingway would punch him in the nose rather than buy him a drink. And yet, and yet, like those damnable Sirens, he is hard to resist.

I recently picked up Gentlemen of the Road, Chabon's slightly cynical homage to the adventure tales of authors like Alexandre Dumas and Sir Walter Scott. Like his predecessors, Chabon's story is episodic, each chapter is fairly self-contained and has a plot all its own. In fact, the novel was serialized in the New York Times Magazine before it was collected together and released in novel form (though I didn't know this when I picked the book up). He even got a comic artist to draw occasional pictures from the text in black and white. I particularly loved this touch since many of my earliest reads, including handed-down Big Little Books, used black and white sketches to compliment the narrative. In fact, I wish more books had pictures, especially for high school readers whose visualization skills seem to be weaker than previous generations.

But I digress. Gentlemen of the Road is a great action-adventure book, even if the prose is murkier than Mexico City on a summer day. Chabon's story focuses on two brilliant and inspired characters who thieve and connive their way through 9th century Khazaria (think of the region North of the Black and Caspian Seas). Yet a dethroned and predominantly annoying princeling manages to worm his way into their hearts and bring out the best of their morality and their derring-do. The characters - Amram and Zelikman - are a disneyfied version of Jules and Vincent from Pulp Fiction. They roam their world with a deeply ironic morality that nonetheless includes frequent use of violence and occasionally drugs to keep things lively. Their horses have names, which aren't nearly as cool as the names and lineages of their weapons. Yet both are crucial as they navigate through marauding Vikings, a disenfranchised Moslem army, and various encounters with elephants. There's also a brothel that offers occasional respite, which no action-novel should ever be without - the brothel that is, though respite too is necessary. Not bad for a contemporary serialized novel. There's even a little redemption in the end. All in all, a highly recommended read from one of the finest if slightly loquacious authors of the last 20 years. [Just so you know: on one page I looked up no less than 6 unknown words, and I had to go to the internet for 3 of them.]