Review: “Gentlemen of the Road” by Michael Chabon

Melancholy Frankish physician Zelikman and African war veteran Amram, brothers in arms, itinerant  wanderers and petty swindlers both, unwittingly find themselves in the service of a deposed Khazar prince in Michael Chabon’s “Gentlemen of the Road.”

Originally published a serial tale in the pages of the New York Times Magazine, GOTR is a retro-pulp adventure tale inspired by the work of Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber, whose Fafhrd and Gray Mouser are obvious inspiration for Amram and Zelikman. However, where Leiber and Howard placed much of their work within a fantasy milieu, Chabon’s novel takes place in the Near East, with Jewish history providing a rich backdrop for this tale of adventure. Zelikman and Amran are both Jews, and Chabon writes in his afterword that his original title for the book was “Jews with Swords,” as it was his intention with this book to address what he saw as a lack of Jewish swordsmen and swashbucklers in popular fiction. An admirable goal, but one that ultimately hobbled by problems I had with both the way the novel was written and Chabon’s less-than-perfect understanding of the genre he chose to emulate.

The novel jumped between scenes a bit too quickly for me, with precious little transition or warning before moving the action to another location or set of characters. What was probably not that noticeable to readers absorbing the story one episode at a time in its original serial form seems glaringly obvious when the pieces are presented as a whole.

With a lesser author it would be easy to excuse this with the assumption that he or she was emulating the “fly by the seat of your pants” style of the earliest pulps, but Chabon has shown no past difficulty in picking up the tropes of other genres while not being restricted by their limitations.

Further, other problems in the novel seem to support the contention that Chabon’s understanding of the pulp tale is not complete. Chabon resolves many of his story’s loose ends through coincidence and happenstance, while stories in the classic swords-and-sorcery/pulp vein usually celebrate the deeds of men who are captains of their own fate, daring men who drive the story forward through bold, decisive action. Fiction of this kind provides plenty of wish fulfillment for readers, and while most are very aware of how arbitrary and cruel fate can be, few choose to pursue fiction that reinforces this sense of helplessness. Better a character who can grab life by the throat and hang on.

Despite these problems, GOTR is an entertaining enough story as long as you don’t expect too much from it. Sadly, this excludes most of Chabon’s regular readers.