done considerable research into early medieval history, with his portrait of Khazaria seeming half factual and half imaginary. He cannot resist drawing parallels with the conflict in Iraq: “In Baghdad during the Days of Awe this year, the Muhammadans burned Jewish prayer houses and put to the sword any who would not profess Islam.” Having Jews and Muslims trying to work together to restore a fallen kingdom suggests the way the world should be.

Amram and Zelikman care little about such struggles but find themselves, after being robbed, helping Filaq’s insurgency nevertheless, backed by an army of Arsiyah mercenaries. Chabon takes the trio from one cliff-hanging adventure to another in the manner of the film serials of the 1930’s and 1940’s. Coincidences abound; the three protagonists, as the genre dictates, are constantly separated only to be unexpectedly reunited; and a few characters are not what they seem to be. Chabon also intends a tribute to the road novel, with his heroes encountering all manner of interesting folk on their journey, including a family of Radanite traders who do not see war as an obstacle to business as usual.

As with The Final Solution and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Chabon is not merely writing imitations of such writers as Rudyard Kipling, H. Rider Haggard, and Edgar Rice Burroughs (the novel is dedicated to Michael Moorcock, author of “sword and sorcery” books in the Burroughs manner), nor is he parodying the buddy films of the late twentieth century. While many writers might treat such an outdated, disparaged genre as the adventure yarn with ironic, postmodern disdain, Chabon is more affectionate.

His characters may not be as fully realized as those in his other works, but they are believably individualistic, full of personality quirks that bring them to life. Zelikman likes to contemplate his circumstances by smoking a pipe of hemp, in the vein of Sherlock Holmes, trying to forget his tortured past, especially the murder of his mother and sister back in Regensburg. He attempts to keep emotionally remote from everything yet harbors great affection for his wizard’s hat and his beloved horse, Hillel, possessor of “a demonic intelligence that lay somewhere between perversity and fire.” Amram is also scarred by a family tragedy: the disappearance of his daughter.

Chabon has considerable fun playing with literary conventions, especially the relationship between his black and white heroes. Having a black or Native American sidekick has been a staple of American fiction since Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) and James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales (1823-1841), though Chabon alters this tradition by making his heroes of equal stature. In his highly influential Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), Leslie Fiedler first called attention to the homoerotic implications of such relationships, especially in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Amram and Zelikman bicker like an old married couple and share an unusual closeness: “As far as Amram knew, his partner had never lain with a woman or a man, and if he had in hard times, on cold nights, shared a companionable bed with Amram, it was a mark of how much the state of their relations resembled those between his partner and Hillel.”

Each of the fifteen chapters features a black-and-white illustration by Garry Gianni reminiscent of the N. C. Wyeth illustrations for books by Cooper and Stevenson, as well as Arthur Conan Doyle’s medieval adventure The White Company (1891) and Gianni’s own style in the Prince Valiant comic strip. Gianni’s drawings perfectly capture the characters and scenes described by Chabon and heighten the nostalgia for the adventure genre.

Chabon’s use of dry humor includes a minor, decidedly unfestive character, Hanukkah, and Zelikman’s naming his horse for the famous Jewish religious leader Hillel. There is also a mynah who speaks “excellent Greek,” and heroic deeds are performed by Hillel and an elephant. Chabon’s whimsical approach can be seen in this description of an elephant: “A steady rattle issued from the mysterious machinery of its interior like wind in the branches of a locust tree, over a deeper rumbling, an unmistakable continuo of pleasure as the stripling rubbed at the piebald patch between its phlegmatic little eyes, gummed with a milky effluence of tears.”

Most seriously, Gentlemen of the Road is a meditation on the quest for Jewish identity. Of Amram, Chabon writes, “There was nowhere new for him to wander, no corner where he had not sought the shadow of his home and family.” Chabon’s Jews survive only through cunning, stealth, and violence.

Gentlemen of the Road received mostly glowing reviews, with Alastair Sooke in London’s Sunday Telegraph calling it “a riotous, raucous jeu d’esprit. It’s been a while since I had such fun reading a book.” As a throwback to the adventure yarns of the past, however, it is less consistently entertaining than the best of George Macdonald Fraser’s Flashman novels. In addition to complaints that the action was not as dramatic as might be expected, some reviewers described Gentlemen of the Road as disjointed because the chapters do not flow smoothly from one to the next, and others considered it more a literary exercise than a fully realized novel.

The novel’s self-consciously mannered prose is the main element elevating the novel above being an adventure pastiche. The Boston Globe’s Steve Almond compared it to “Kipling on steroids.” Chabon writes in a mock-epic style full of arcane words and clauses within clauses:All that remained of the temple, reared by Alexander during his failed conquest of Caucasia and affiant now to that failure and to the ruin of his gods, was a wind-worn pedestal and the candle stub of a fluted column, against which a would-be ruffian named Hanukkah sat propped with his right hand over the wound in his sizable belly, as he had sat for two long days and nights, waiting with mounting impatience for the angel of death.

In an afterword, Chabon describes how he was inspired to write what he imagined calling Jews with Swords, as a break from writing about domestic issues. He argues that because Jews seem “less obviously suited to exploits of derring-do and arms,” it is all the more appropriate to hand his fictional Jews swords and let them rip. Although some reviewers interpreted this coda as a bit defensive, it is a charming way for Chabon to round off his tale.

At its heart, Gentlemen of the Road is a celebration of the transforming magic of literature, as when Chabon, in one of the book’s loveliest passages, describes a character’s memory of “the giant illuminated Ibn Khordadbeh that had so enchanted her as a child, with its maps and preposterous anatomies and flat-foot descriptions of miracles and wonders, page after page of cities to visit and peoples to live among and selves to invent.” One of Chabon’s goals may be to demonstrate that literature need not conform to the standards of the day, especially the naturalism so dominant in the American fiction of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Chabon’s books indicate his desire to restore a sense of fun to the American novel.