Gentlemen of the Road
Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road. Go read it.
Due to time constraints, Reuben was unable to acquire and read a copy of Mockingbird before print time, so today’s review is something from the back catalog instead.
Michael Chabon ought to be a quiet hero to dorks everywhere. He made his name as a Very Serious-Minded Literary Writer, writing Very Serious-Minded Modern Literature. Short stories that got published in the New Yorker, novels about creative struggles, joblessness, Judaism, sexuality, divorce, frustration, alienation, and failure. They were good, of course, but nobody was ever going to side-eye you and shake their head if they saw you reading Wonder Boys or The Mysteries of Pittsburgh on the bus. They were…respectable books.
But Mr. Chabon, as it happened, grew up as kind of a Big Stinkin’ Nerd, and that never really left him. He wrote a novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, that was still essentially naturalist fiction, but was about two young nerds who helped invent the American comic book industry. That won the Pulitzer, and it opened the floodgates for Mr. Chabon’s forays into tasty, tasty genre. The Final Solution: an aged Sherlock Holmes working against the Nazis. Summerland: a YA novel cramming baseball, Norse myth, and pure fantasy into a single package that would have made my teenage self explode in pent-up delight. The Yiddish Polceman’s Union: a stellar alternate history/noir novel taking place in a Jewish-occupied corner of Alaska, Israel with freezer burn. (That one won a Hugo.) And more.
Most germane to this article, in 2007 he published a novella chapter by chapter in the New York Times Magazine, pulp fiction-style (not Pulp Fiction-style, which would be hard to explain). I discovered it midway through, leafing through the magazine at work and fixing on it. I had no idea who this Zelikman fellow was, or why he was so worried about someone named Amram, or what Moslem mercenaries or Viking pirates had to do with anything. All I knew was that the venerable, dignified New York Times was publishing something in which a guy fought off several other guys with a rapier, made a daring escape on horseback, and then got high to console himself.
Fucking awesome.
As I’d piece together later, this was Gentlemen of the Road, a serial novel given by Mr. Chabon the working title of Jews With Swords. Seriously. That’s the entire concept, and I’m tempted to just drop the mic and walk out right here. Jews With Swords! Come on! But I should probably provide further context for readers who didn’t happen to grow up Jewish & nerdy; as Mr. Chabon points out in a post-script, Yid kids don’t have a lot of action heroes. A few historical ones, but growing up in pop culture, I basically had Ben Grimm, Magneto, Jake from Animorphs, and Walter in The Big Lebowski. Everyone else might as well have been played by Woody Allen.
With Gentlemen, Mr. Chabon took a stab (or a big battle-axe swing) at filling a couple more portraits on that gallery. The book opens in the 10th-century Khazar Empire (modern-day Turkey), where two ill-tempered travelers get into a showy, lethal duel at a merchant entrepot. The duel is a sham, of course; something for the crowd to place bets on so the house can take a cut and the pair of con-artists can take a cut of that in turn. But their obvious skill at arms attracts attention from a man, a servant of a recently deposed king, who might have more serious work for these two; simply being in the same area as that presumptive employer attracts trouble. And so: adventure!
The two titular gentleman of the road are a pair in the classic Big Guy, Little Guy mold – Fahfrd and the Gray Mouser, Fezzik and Inigo Montoya, Asterix and Obelix. Big is an aging Abyssinian named Amram, who started out as a young father searching the world for his kidnapped daughter and ended up finding lucrative mercenary opportunities instead. Little is a Frankish physician named Zelikman, who watched his family slaughtered by superstitious Germans and now wanders the world making bad decisions. Amram is canny, philosophical, and tempers his essential good nature with a streak of necessary ruthlessness; Zelikman is acerbic, potentially manic-depressive, and moved to action only by spite or the lingering coals of affection for the few things he cares for (Amram, his horse Hillel, his shrinking collection of very fine hats.) Together, they are a partnership against all the rest of the world – at least, until things get interesting.
I will state straight-out that the writing style of this book is certainly affected, and deliberately so. Mr. Chabon set out to mimic not just the plot of swashbuckling serials, but the tone as well, with florid prose, extended sentences, and verbose dialogue, carrying shades of Michael Moorcock and Robert E. Howard. A sample sentence:
“Easily as a sailor handling a blasphemy, the African reached behind him for the Viking axe (whose name, cut in runes along its ashwood handle, translated roughly as “Defiler of Your Mother”), but three little words preserved the cordial relations between the head and neck of the intruder, a wiry old party armed with a short sword, Persian by the look of him, with a knob of scar tissue where his right eye had been and a curious scar.”
That style of writing may not be to your taste; may, in fact, be as far from your taste as possible. On the other hand, if you’re not sure, this is a book where one of the heroes goes around with a battle-axe named Mother Fucker. His axe is named Mother Fucker. Are we clear on that point? (Because you’re wondering, Zelikman’s sword is named Lancet, which is a joke about his background as a physician. It’s got a neat back-story. But it’s nothing compared to Amram’s axe, which is still named Mother Fucker.)
The plot of the story isn’t as byzantine as the language may suggest, more or less sticking to the upward arc suggested by plopping a couple of veteran adventurers into the middle of a political struggle. As for the cast, Amram and Zelikman are quickly joined by Filaq, a foul-mouthed, surly teenager presented as the mostly useless son of a dead king but quickly proves to be both less and more. The world’s crappiest sellsword rounds out the party, and they quickly encounter the aforementioned Moslem mercenaries and Viking pirates, as well as a band of Jewish merchants, a house of prostitutes, and in the new King of Khazaria, a sometimes sympathetic, sometimes decidedly not, overall villain.
I harped on a bit before about the Jews With Swords thing, and to an extent, it’s really just flavor, fan-service for the Heebs among Mr. Chabon’s audience. But there’s also an element of the mythic to it. Khazaria was an actual place, one of Eurasia’s great kingdoms from the 7th to 11th centuries, but the idea of a Dark Ages empire occupied and ruled by Jews can strike the reader with a sense of the unreal and exotic, a touch of Howard’s Hyperborea. So, too, is Zelikman and Amram’s Judaism significant. Jews wander. It’s what we do, what we’ve done for three thousand years, and the pair’s aimless scamming and hapless stumble into heroism reflects on that. From a modern perspective, it’s weird to see a pair of Yids wandering around the world, with axe and rapier and wits, earning their keep by killing other people or pretending to kill each other. But when you take the long view, of course that’s what they’re doing. What the hell else would they do?
Gentlemen of the Road is a fine book, drawing its wicked little dagger-cut of a plot slowly across the colorful canvas of ancient history and near myth. For all the high adventure and action, it unfolds at an almost lackadaisical, hypnotic pace. Sort of a fireside story, Uncle Meyerle sitting the little shkotzes down and telling them about their great-great-great-unto-infinity-grand-uncle, who used a sword, if you can believe it, and fell in with a couple of swindlers named Zelikman and Amram, who set out to make a fast payday and ended up trying to steal a kingdom.
And just as an added inducement, the full print edition of the novel contains a bunch of illustrations by Gary Gianni, quite effectively capturing the feel of the story. It’s not a long book, easily available in paperback or on e-book as needed, and can always be flipped around for Serious Literary Cred if you feel like producing some. “Oh, you didn’t know Pulitzer-winner Michael Chabon wrote pulp adventure stories? Boy are you missing out!” Thanks for keeping the faith for all us dorks, Mr. Chabon. And thanks for all the nice hats.
