What I Am Reading: "Gentlemen of the Road" by Michael Chabon

I've read a few of Michael Chabon's books before. This short novel is a self-conscious departure from the usual serious-adult-topic, MFA-sculpted professional novelist's fiction he is known for into the world of sword-and-sandal adventure. He jokes in the afterword about wanting to title the book "Jews With Swords," and is his attempt to prove that Jews are natural adventurers, as wanderers often facing danger.

Not only are the adventurers Jewish, but the story takes place in a Jewish kingdom. It is set around the middle of the 10th century among the Khazar people. They are a Turkic and Jewish civilization who lived between the Caspian and the Black Sea for a few centuries around the turn of the first millennium. Not much is known about them, since they left little of their own written records, but it is believed that they converted to Judaism to keep their status as a buffer state between the Christian Byzantines and the Muslim Umayyads.

This book doesn’t focus on the history, however. It is a swashbuckling adventure tale, and not a chapter passes without one of the two main characters using their wits to solve a problem, or getting into or out of danger. The two roving adventurers are Amram, an Abyssinian Jew, and Zelikman, a Jew from Regensburg. Amram is a massive warrior who can frequently be found playing shatranj (a board game) and carries a Viking axe labeled "Defiler of Your Mother" in runes. Zelikman is a depressed physician (or just barber-surgeon? unclear) from a prominent family in his city. Both had lost family to violence: Amram had a wife killed and a daughter stolen in a slaving raid, and Zelikman had been unable to defend his family in a pogrom. Now the latter carried a blade that was technically an oversized bloodletting fleam, since Jews were not allowed to be armed in his city.

We meet these two executing a con in a tavern, where their martial prowess in a fake fight against each other leads them to be entrusted to bring Filaq to safety in Azerbaijan. Filaq is the elephant-obsessed royal survivor of a coup in the Khazar capital, who would rather return and fight the usurper than be brought to safety. This “merry” band spends several adventures failing upward, as the safe haven has already been raided when they arrive; then Filaq wins over the raiders to the mission of liberation; then the raiders are taken by a larger, mercenary army. This army is then also won over, as they are Muslims whom the new Khazar rulers are declining to protect from raids by Rus Vikings. This does not go according to plan, and Amram and Zelikman must help Filaq, revealed to actually be a woman in disguise, through more subtle methods, involving the dual leadership of the bek, or war king (who was overthrown), and the kagan, the isolated spiritual leader.

The book was a little corny, but I'm sure it was fun to write, with purposefully oblique and droll prose. It goes on for exactly as long as it needs to, and serves as both a middle-unit and a palate cleanser in my historical fiction spree.