Book review: Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon
Michael Chabon writes of the travels of two unlikely gentlemen
Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon (2007) is set in 950, the 10th century AD, in the Caucasus mountains of Khazaria, which is now Ukraine.
Two men, Amram and Zelikman, are on the road, travelling together – an unlikely pair for Amram is older and bigger and Zeliman is younger and thinner. Amram carries an axe that he calls ‘Defiler of Your Mother’ while Zelikman is a doctor with a bloodletting instrument. Amran is Abyssinian African, which is now Ethiopia, and Zelikman is a German Frank, being from the Frankish region of northern France, Belgium, and western Germany.
Both are Jewish adventurers in Khazaria, the ancient Jewish empire of the Khazars. The Khazars converted to Judaism in the 8th or 9th century, which Zelikman calls “the fabled kingdom of wild red-haired Jews.” The difference is that Zelikman was born Jewish and Amram thinks of himself as Jewish.
The two men call themselves “gentlemen of the road” but they are not gentlemen. They are “swords for hire” – that is, blade runners, meaning that they are con artists, smugglers, bandits, and thieves, trading mainly in horses. They love to stage a duel with unwitting spectators betting on the winner. But, although they call themselves swordsmen, they rarely use their swords.
Deceptively rugged and brutal looking, they are not in reality. Rather than thrust a sword into someone’s stomach, they are more interested in healing, for they are both melancholic and gloomy.
Deceptively known as wanderers, runners, and adventurers, they are not in reality. They lament that they have nowhere to go: “nowhere new for him to wander, no corner where he had not sought the shadow of his home and family.” Instead of swashbuckling bravados looking for a conquest, a holy grail, they are actually homesick and nostalgic mothers’ boys.
This is a parody, written tongue-in-cheek, almost like the 1979 British comedy film Monty Python’s Life of Brian – about a young Jewish-Roman boy called Brian Cohen of Nazareth, who is mistaken for being Jesus because they were born on the same day and lived next to each other.
The writing of Gentlemen of the Road is witty and funny in a long-winded way, but often fraught with danger in crossing swords – literary swords – in which deception is king and the boundaries between fact and farce are blurred.
More about gentlemen in website: Global Gentlemanliness
