Chabon and on and on: a review of Gentlemen of the Road

I read Michael Chabon's totally awesome mega-novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay a couple years ago, and since then, I'd been meaning to pick up some more of his work. As usual, it was only several months ago that I bought one of his more recent novels, Gentlemen of the Road (2007), and as usual, it took a few more months before I settled into reading it. And AS USUAL, it took no time at all to blow through. What's totally out of the ordinary about today, though, is that I'm getting to the review mere HOURS after finishing the book. Like 12, I'm not even kidding.

Gentlemen is, before all else, an adventure story. It follows two long-time traveling companions (gentlemen of the road, you might call them) in tenth century AD Europe as they tumble in and out of situations of varying degrees of stickiness, from getting caught in a gambling swindle at a road-side inn to ushering revolution into Khazaria, the area of Europe and the Middle East now roughly corresponding to Turkey. In keeping with certain adventure story tropes, the companions are opposites in many respects, but they complement each other and come together at crucial junctures. Amram is an Abyssinian; dark and built like a tank; unexpectedly tender-hearted; fearsome with his ax (which is pretty awesomely named Defiler of All Mothers); handy on the shatranj board. Zelikman is a Frank; skinny and blond (I imagined a resemblence to Tom Petty); brooding and solitary; nimble with a sword; handy as a surgeon. Both are impressively multi-lingual; sarcastic and quick with a come back; of a tragic past; absolutely, if at times begrudgingly, committed to the other; of questionable or at the very least, unpredictable morals, but ultimately good; Jewish. As they scheme and improvise their way across South-Eastern Europe, they encounter and unwittingly join up with the Arabic Hanukkah and the Khazarian Filaq, also- despite another range of binary oppositions- Jewish and suffering from the loss of loved ones. The main adventure in the novel becomes the rag-tag group's effort to establish Filaq in his rightful place as the ruler of Khazaria, taken over by the usurper Beljan.

Just looking at the cast characters, one might guess that a lot of themes and issues for analysis may emerge from this novel, primarily, Jewishness. Some reviewers have criticized Chabon for NOT developing this aspect of the book, but I would argue that Gentlemen contains other thematic Easter eggs (if I may use such a gentile term) which invite further thought. For example, the relationships the characters have with animals- particularly horses and elephants- plays a major part in foregrounding the historical setting, moving the plot, and fleshing out characters. While I only scanned a google search-ful of reviews, the absence of a mention of animals in other critics' write-ups of this novel surprised me. A second element that really caught my attention concerned language and communication: the over coming of language barriers, communicating with animals through language or body signals, life in a multi-lingual world, 'reading' non-verbal texts like the earth and people, writing on objects, it goes on. Chabon heavily incorporates the details of the communicative process into Gentlemen, not only by way of the plot, but also in comparisons (of which there are a glorious many) and figurative language. Maybe it's because I've been reading up on metafiction lately, and I'm seeing connections that weren't intentional, but I think the theme of communication and in particular, language, runs as a huge, if subtle, undercurrent of this novel.

And speaking of language, the literary quality of Gentlemen is pretty fantastic. The way Chabon paces his narrative with his sentences surprised me with its efficacy. Usually, I'm against overly wordy sentences that harbor meticulously detailed descriptions or roving comparisons, or that bring the reader all over time or space before getting to the point and might require a couple of readings to keep track of all the clauses, but I actually enjoyed them here. Maybe it's just where I am in my own experience as a reader; maybe this would be a good time to try and get into Faulkner, I don't know. In any case, Chabon's sentences, similes, and descriptions here are as meandering, whimsical, at times violent, but generally good-hearted, and enjoyable as his protagonists and their story. I will admit, I did some underlining.

In a nutshell, here's what Gentlemen isn't: Kavalier and Klay, life-altering, heavy. Here's what it is: an adventure tale, a fun read, literary, swash-buckling.