Swashbucklers, In the Empire Of Khazaria

Michael Chabon surprises again in this picaresque adventure.

GENTLEMEN OF THE ROAD

By Michael Chabon

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Ballantine/Del Rey. 204 pp. $21.95

Michael Chabon is forever changing gears as a writer. In this novel, serialized in the New York Times Magazine earlier this year, he takes on 10th-century Khazaria, a Jewish kingdom between the Black and Caspian Seas, and creates a picaresque, swashbuckling adventure, each chapter charmingly illustrated by Gary Gianni. Though the original title was Jews with Swords, the more measured Gentlemen of the Road serves just fine. Chabon's highfalutin writing is an object lesson in style perfectly matched to genre.

The number one gentleman, "the Frankish scarecrow" Zelikman -- swindler, doctor, poet, warrior, con man -- hits the Silk Road with his sidekick, a giant African named Amram. This dynamic duo, as joined at the hip as Batman and Robin or Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, ends up in a fight for control of the empire of Khazaria. There they befriend Filaq, heir to the deposed king, a stripling swaddled in a bearskin who "gave off an aroma, more powerful than that of horse dung or cheese or one-eyed Persians, of money."

While hardly resistant to the seductions of money, the two don't take on Filaq's cause for mere fortune alone. Zelikman longs to see "the fabled kingdom of wild red-haired Jews on the western shore of the Caspian Sea." Their perilous attempts to reach that city and restore Filaq to the throne result in battles galore, lives saved and lost, encounters with beks, a Khagan, Hillel the horse, Cunegunde the elephant, a ruffian called Hanukkah, mercenaries, tearful cavalrymen, Northmen who are "slaves to their appetites" and a quest for the perfect hat.

If any good adventure is all about the journey, there is also, as Amram remarks, "an appeal in the idea of seeing some business through from start to finish." And the lark Chabon has in getting there translates into a hoot for the reader. Still, such an arch, lickety-split odyssey won't be everyone's cuppa. The pulp-averse, the history-challenged, the Khazar-illiterate might feel at a disadvantage without a glossary of 10th-century terms. Not every reader will be willing to take all this on literary faith.

Nevertheless, if you stick with this tale, you'll be rewarded with a slalom course's worth of twists, not to mention a suitable moral. "All the evil in the world derives from the actions of men acting in a mass against other masses of men," notes Zelikman, whose insight, thanks to his creator, never keeps him from brandishing his sword.

-- Mameve Medwed's fifth novel, "Of Men and their Mothers," will be published in May.