Gentlemen of the Road

by Michael Chabon. (2007) Published by Del Rey. 204 pages.

Up to page 107. Reviewed 15 March 2008

Reading Michael Chabon’s account of an uprising in the Eastern European kingdom of Khazaria is like going back to the greatest games of pretend I used to play with my friends in childhood. I don’t know if it’s true of everyone, but my friend Duncan and I used to be shameless borrowers of themes and ideas, taking stories from books, tv and comics and reenacting them with action figures or in drawings or with toy soldiers or even just making up stories. Play was a means of bridging gaps through time and space and trying to explore events real and fictional that we were curious about.
The kingdom of Khazaria was an actual place, a Jewish kingdom located in the middle of Eastern Europe. I first learned of it reading Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe, Volume 3, (I highly recommend Gonick's whole series) and it fascinated me because it went so much against the stereotype of European Jews as a permanently displaced people. Michael Chabon is also interested in this aspect of the story and in his book he reminds us of the fact that the ideas of Judaism traveled far and wide during the Dark Ages; the main characters are Zelikman, a Jewish physician from the Frankish kingdoms, and Amram, an Abyssinian Jew on an apparently hopeless quest to find his lost daughter.
What’s fun about this novel? The much-celebrated use of lush vocabulary (fleam, mahout, affined); the sense of taking a visit to an intersection of the great Eastern cultures that actually thrived during the so called “Dark” Ages, which were a time of darkness and squalor mostly from the perspective of Western Europe; the chance to see Chabon flirt with thoughts of today’s cultural wars in the Middle East by drawing a bloody conflict for the fate of Khazaria where the labels of race and creed are all familiar but the affiliations are drastically different; and the chance to see how Chabon, who’s very good at “serious” fiction, takes on a setting that’s Tolkeinesque.
It would be more fun if the characters were a bit richer. Zelikman and Amram are basically nice guys, each with their own troubles and idiosyncrasies, but even halfway through the book I’m sure that neither of them will draw me in enough to inspire the sort of love-hate relationship I had with Grady from The Wonder Boys.

Page 107 to end; reviewed March 22, 2008

107 to end.

At the end of this book Chabon writes a short afterword in which he touches on what should already be blindingly obvious to everybody who’s familiar with his other work: that Gentlemen of the Road is very different from other things he’s written. Any time an author has to go to this much length to explain a supposedly bold artistic choice, you have to wonder if the motive is to vent all the lingering insecurity. In his afterword, Chabon tells us that we might be surprised that he’s breaking the rules; he usually writes New Yorker type fiction about contemporary conflicts and anxieties, and now he’s writing an adventure story. Having loved Wonder Boys, I know that I started reading this book with a sense of excitement. It seems natural that a writer like Chabon should try to expand his horizons, should take the skills he gained in describing more familiar territory and see how they transfer to settings more remote and exotic.
But when a writer enters a new genre, he or she should have something to contribute. Chabon seems to assume that because he’s writing about swordfights and troop movements, he no longer has to live up to the standards set in his previous books. Gentlemen of the Road borrows heavily from the clichés of fantasy writing and historical fiction, and does a major disservice to both genres by never partaking in the sort of overindulgence of the imagination that both genres allow. By taking Khazaria as his subject, Chabon has chosen a distinctive world to set his story in; one hopes he could make it into his own Hogwarts, his own Middle Earth, his own Narnia. But Khazaria ends up being just a piece of stock historical scenery, as though Chabon is saying, “Did you see the movie Gladiator? Just imagine the whole thing transposed a little to the east and you’ve got it.”
By the end of this book the narrative keeps making big jumps in time, as though he’s eager to get away from the whole situation. The sentences get long and muddled. Chabon seems to want to use elephants as a symbol for something, but it’s never clear what. The first chapters of this book were well written and fun to read, but by the end I was just thinking that if Chabon didn’t have anything fresh to offer with this book, at least he had the courtesy to make it short.