Michael Chabon
Gentlemen of the Road
224pp. Sceptre. %26pound;12.
978 0 340 95345 9
At the end of Gentlemen of the Road, after all the derring-do is derring-done,
and the dust has settled on the corpse-strewn plains of the Caucasus,
Michael Chabon has a quiet afterword with his readers, in which he confides
that, despite the book%26rsquo;s official title, he cannot help but think of it as
%26ldquo;Jews with Swords%26rdquo;, a working title that has not failed to cause amusement
in those who heard it first. The author is not so inclined to find it
entirely a laughing matter. The Jews, after all, he sees as
arch-adventurers, and not the less adventurous for having embarked on their
long history of persecution and peregrination in a spirit of reluctance, or
even unreadiness. Their great warrior tradition (%26ldquo;Here%26rsquo;s to Judas Maccabeus,
/ Boy, if he could only see us%26rdquo;, as Tom Lehrer once put it) can be obscured
only too easily by the image of Woody Allen %26ldquo;backing toward the nearest exit
behind a barrage of wisecracks and a wavering rapier%26rdquo;. The gentlemen of the
road in Gentlemen of the Road seldom waver, or wisecrack, or retreat. Set
largely in the hyperpolyglottal Jewish state of Khazaria, the story is also
something of a brave and (relatively) new excursion on the part of their
creator:
“As recently as ten years ago I had published two novels, and perhaps as
many as twenty short stories, and not one of them featured weaponry more
antique than a (lone) Glock 9mm. None was set any earlier than about 1972 or
in any locale more far-flung or exotic than a radio studio in Paris, France
. . . . here, in Gentlemen of the Road as in some of its recent
predecessors, you catch me in the act of trying, as a writer, to do what
many of the characters in my earlier stories %26ndash; Art Bechstein, Grady Tripp,
Ira Wiseman %26ndash; were trying, longing, ready to do: I have gone off in search
of a little adventure.”
The search has led Chabon to an interesting place and time; the date of it was
given as AD 950 in the New York Times Magazine, where the story first
appeared in fifteen parts over five months, beginning in January this year.
It takes him some way from the mid twentieth century, which was reimagined
both playfully and seriously in his recent tales of mystery and deduction,
The Final Solution (2004) and The Yiddish Policemen%26rsquo;s Union (2007).
Gentlemen of the Road concerns two wily survivors, a Frankish Jew called
Zelikman and an Abyssinian Jew called Amram, and their entanglement in the
fate of Khazaria, where one ruler, the kagan, is never seen, though his word
is law, while a coup has recently replaced the other, the bek. The bek%26rsquo;s
family has been inexactly decimated, and only two sons remain %26ndash; Alp, flung
to a far corner of the map, and the younger Filaq, whose safekeeping becomes
the responsibility of Amram and Zelikman, the alpha and omega of mercenary
good sense, who at first refuse to get involved (%26ldquo;we don%26rsquo;t stoop to
politics%26rdquo;). Their initial source of information, a mahout responsible for
the Khazarian war elephants, entrusts Filaq (whose name makes him a %26ldquo;Little
Elephant%26rdquo;) to them after seeing them stage a mock duel at a caravanserai in
the kingdom of Arran. Sensing the true skill beneath their feints, the
mahout asks them to take the boy to his maternal grandfather in Azerbaijan,
in return for a sum of money %26ldquo;equal to five times the salary of a dekarch in
the army of Byzantium%26rdquo;. But then the mahout is shot through the gizzard, by
one of the new bek%26rsquo;s men, and the adventure may begin in earnest.
Filaq turns out to be a handful, making life difficult for his protectors by
cursing, then running away from them, then repeating both tricks; despite
Zelikman%26rsquo;s reminder that revenge %26ldquo;is the sole property of God%26rdquo;, Filaq cannot
be dissuaded from seeking it against the usurper of his father%26rsquo;s rank. %26ldquo;I
want him to suffer . . . . To hurt, to writhe in pain.%26rdquo; %26ldquo;You and God have a
great deal in common%26rdquo;, replies Zelikman, who holds heretical views about
creation and its creator.
Though he and Amram know themselves to be swindlers, taking their directions
from a compass that points always towards easy gain, they navigate on this
occasion in favour of the obstinate boy: %26ldquo;A gentleman of the road worthy of
the title would convey him to the nearest slave market and see what price he
fetched%26rdquo;, remarks one to the other, when it is established that the fabled
fortress they were hopefully heading for has been destroyed, and with it the
prospect of a five-dekarch fee. %26ldquo;I fear that explains our overall lack of
success at this game%26rdquo;, says the other. %26ldquo;Because I%26rsquo;m not going to do that.%26rdquo;
%26ldquo;No . . . neither am I.%26rdquo; The subsequent descent reaches a lower depth than
politics %26ndash; the coming of a war takes them from ransacked cities on the
Caspian Sea to the heart of the Khazarian state. %26ldquo;Islands have always been
strange and magical places; crossing the water to reach them ought to be,
even in a small way, an adventure%26rdquo;, Chabon wrote in another novel, the
baseball-based Summerland, and sure enough, in this little adventure,
%26ldquo;swimming to the library at the heart of the world%26rdquo; fulfils just such an
expectation.
In the best tradition of such adventures, the blond beanpole and the African
giant turn out to be reluctant scoundrels, forced into crime by
circumstance, the former saving lives as often as he takes them. (Nor is it
quite accurate to call them Jews with swords; Zelikman, the doctor, wields
Lancet, %26ldquo;a long, absurdly thin bodkin%26rdquo;, Amram a Viking axe bearing the runic
legend %26ldquo;Defiler of Your Mother%26rdquo;.) Their embroilment in Filaq%26rsquo;s affairs fills
Zelikman with that special despondency reserved for the exhausted surgeon %26ndash;
%26ldquo;I don%26rsquo;t save lives . . . I just prolong their futility%26rdquo; %26ndash; exacerbating
those melancholic slumps from which only his pipe-smoking can relieve him.
Taking swipes at one another at the caravanserai was a phoney war compared
to what happens during their time with Filaq: %26ldquo;It%26rsquo;s soldiering, Amram. I
want nothing to do with soldiers, armies, chains of command. All the evil in
the world derives from the actions of men acting in a mass against other
masses of men%26rdquo;. Amram himself derives little comfort from the situation, a
sudden insight emerging from a wider, impersonal view:
“With nightfall, a wind blew in over the sea, from the lands beyond the
Khazar Sea and beyond the vast steppe of the north, from kingdoms of forest
and snow that Amram understood to be the habitations of witches and snow
djinn and warrior women who rode on the backs of bears and of giant deer. In
the wind was a promise only of ice, storm and advan-cing darkness, and Amram
knelt on the northern slope of a strange mountain, far from home, drew his
woolen cloak more tightly around his shoulders and knew in his heart that he
would end his days in some winter kingdom, among wintry men.”
We may not be in Pittsburgh any more, with Arthurs Bechstein and Lecomte, or
Professor Tripp and his %26ldquo;basically done%26rdquo; fourth novel, but we are not far
from the established rhythms and colours of Chabon%26rsquo;s wily imagination. Those
long, unwinding sentences with which he has cruised down so many American
streets, enticing the reader from phrase to phrase, handle the Khazarian
terrain equally well, switching between landscape and portrait views of the
world. The episodic format of the novel%26rsquo;s magazine serialization perhaps
required that such transitions were accomplished concisely. In a short story
such as %26ldquo;House Hunting%26rdquo;, published in Werewolves in Their Youth, an unhappy
couple%26rsquo;s viewing of a prospective new home affords one of them, the husband,
a new view of marriage, not as %26ldquo;a safe house in a world of danger; the
ultimate haven of two solitary, fearful souls%26rdquo;, but as %26ldquo;a doubtful
enterprise, a voyage in an untested craft, across a hostile ocean, with a
map that was a forgery and with no particular destination but the grave%26rdquo;.
This insight comes, however, at the death. Amram and Zelikman, another
partnership, are permitted a greater diffusion of individual glimpses into
the nature of things, not with the illusion of a safe house for shelter but
only the consolation of one another%26rsquo;s company: %26ldquo;Amram had lost much and
fared widely alone, but Zelikman was simply born lonely%26rdquo;. When they argue
about whether they should accept responsibility for Filaq %26ndash; %26ldquo;like a couple
of Regensburg fishwives%26rdquo; %26ndash; the indirectly reported dispute sounds like a
his-and-hers display of mutual recalcitrance, in which each brings nursed
grievances to bear on the current dilemma. But when they must part,
bickering is replaced by %26ldquo;some plain words in five languages, all of them
roughly synonyms for farewell%26rdquo;. Chabon%26rsquo;s fictional world remains a small one
in which companionship, however uneasy, is nonetheless often the best
makeshift break there can be from complete solitude.
In an interview published in Dissent earlier this year, about The Yiddish
Policemen%26rsquo;s Union, Chabon mentioned his %26ldquo;immersion [in] and alienation from%26rdquo;
Yiddish, a language he does not speak; his grandparents%26rsquo; generation did
speak it, and this recollected exposure influenced the written English of
that novel. Amram and Zelikman, by contrast, swearing at one another in
Greek, questioning Filaq (a name they think is Persian) in the %26ldquo;holy tongue
of the Jews%26rdquo;, are linguistic adepts. They have to be, for they pass through
lands rich in both synagogues and mosques, and meet murderous Northmen,
mercantile Jewish Radanites riding an elephant acquired in Francia and a
band of Muslim warriors loyal to a Jewish ruler. The road they are on is no
place for the unworldly. The inlaid map invites the reader to turn back from
the text every now and again and hunt north or south for Derbent, Tiflis or
Trebizond, though the dotted line of adventure has to be imagined.
Old-fashioned line drawings, by Gary Gianni, decorate each chapter,
accompanied by the relevant lines (%26ldquo;At this there was a murmuring among the
soldiers%26rdquo;; %26ldquo;A commotion was therefore unavoidable%26rdquo;); for the most part,
these are satisfactory substitutes for the paintings by Laura Carlin that
accompanied the serialized novel in the New York Times Magazine. Sceptre has
attempted to give the cover of the book a gilt charm that would not look out
of place next to other twenty-first-century novels such as Magnus Mills%26rsquo;s
Explorers of the New Century, Chloe Hooper%26rsquo;s A Child%26rsquo;s Book of True Crime,
and Julian Barnes%26rsquo;s Arthur %26amp; George. The harmless look of
Gentlemen of the Road %26ndash; described on the cover but not on the title page as
%26ldquo;A Tale of Adventure%26rdquo; %26ndash; belies its setting in a world that is not entirely
extinct or fanciful: %26ldquo;If the great Caliph in Baghdad sees fit to permit his
Jews to be burned, it would be improper for the kagan of the Khazars not to
ensure that his Muslims receive the same treatment%26rdquo;. Chabon%26rsquo;s gentlemen
cannot afford the luxury of romanticism.
As if the distinctive period appurtenances were not enough, there is that
apologetic afterword, with its echo of the tone with which Chabon introduced
a comic book offshoot of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier %26amp; Clay,
titled The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist: %26ldquo;Escape and escapism, in art
and literature, have received a bad name. It was given to them, I believe,
by the very people who forged the locks and barred the windows in the first
place%26rdquo;. If that applies to comic books, it might easily be said of the yarns
to which Gentlemen of the Road pays tribute. There is a danger here of
Chabon trapping himself in his own fandom. But amid the pleasant
distractions of pastiche, and the pleas that his novel be taken both
seriously and in the spirit of an escapade, he offers the customary pleasure
of the variegated and vivid choice of words at his disposal merely in
English. He may deploy the word %26ldquo;iron%26rdquo; too often for some tastes, applying
it to anything from the ticking of a kettle and the taste of blood, to the
sound of hooves and the smell of snow %26ndash; but meanwhile there are horses
%26ldquo;loudly gourmandizing the dry chess grass%26rdquo;, castle ramparts %26ldquo;garlanded with
the bodies of helmeted guards%26rdquo;, a journey that partakes of %26ldquo;the labyrinthine
tedium of a dream%26rdquo;, military ranks swelling %26ldquo;like a gangrenous leg%26rdquo;,
would-be soldiers armed with %26ldquo;a pruning hook or a fishing spear or the
time-dulled sword of a grandfather%26rsquo;s grand-father%26rdquo;. It would perhaps be more
romantic than realistic to describe this as a gift for cadence which
transcends genre and requires no apology, but it is cadence nonetheless that
gives the lonely road its true resonance.
Michael Caines is editing a book on David Garrick. His anthology of
plays by eighteenth-century women was published in 2004.
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