Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon

 

Another instance--like the Spufford--where it's interesting to see such a Serious Writer write something so thoroughly genre: In this case, Chabon is riffing on pretty classic sword-and-sorcery fiction by authors such as Lieber and Howard and Moorcock (but completely without anything more magical than some amazingly effective knockout rags); he does so rather well, it's clear he knows the genre and even though there's some vaguely contrarian impulse (based on his afterword) to choosing Jewish main characters and a Jewish empire (that really existed around the end of the first millennium) as well as some more real-world points to make, after a brief time that all ceases to matter, the story just kinda goes. It's a very picaresque story, in a more old-fashioned way than just "episodic," these "Gentlemen of the Road" are occasionally altruistic scoundrels, the story focuses on a stretch of such occasions. It's witty and funny, and Chabon uses indirect dialogue to some devastatingly humorous effect; the characters are all more or less believable, there's even differences among them visible in the dialogue, which isn't as common as it could be. While the narrative doesn't follow much of a traditional arc, there is a sense of the stakes gradually being raised before Chabon wraps up the arc of the novel. A fun and relatively light read.