Michael Chabon, in this homage to the pulp adventures of the early to mid-twentieth century, here gives us a classic tale of two bickering partners, equally skilled in survival and combat, on a seemingly endless quest, traveling mercenaries qua vagabonds, keen on turning a quick profit and yet driven by deeper concerns. The Abyssinian Jew, Amram, is wandering the world in search of a kidnapped daughter and, after a ten year stint in the service of the Byzantines, has hooked up with a renegade scholar and physician from the Jewish quarter of Regensburg, a German township in the West. The hook here is that both these adventurers are Jews, something that seems an anomaly at the time when this book is set since Jews of that era were mostly merchants, scholars and physicians, a people largely marginalized by the other ethnic groups among whom they moved. Chabon has put these adventurers in the orbit of the Khazar Empire, a land barely remembered today which surprised its contemporaries and later historians by adopting the Jewish faith.
The Khazars were a Turkic people who built an empire on the remnants of Attila the Hun's conquests in the Caucasus region of what is today southern Russia. When confronted with aggressive assaults by the neighboring great powers of their day, the Byzantine Empire and the Arab Caliphate, these nomadic horsemen chose to please neither but offend both equally by adopting a religion which both empires claimed to respect. Neither the Byzantine Christians nor the Muslim Arabs could condemn the Khazars' official conversion to Judaism, or see it as an alliance with the other, and so the Khazars were able to remain neutral in the long term struggle between Byzantium and Islam. In the process they managed to rule a fairly compact empire for more than two hundred years (from about 737 - 952 AD) in which all faiths were tolerated (though the Khazar rulers seem to have become more or less full fledged Jews some time after their initial conversion).
It is this empire, with its war-like steppe horsemen professing Judaism, that forms the backdrop for Chabon's fast paced tale of two itinerant soldiers on the lam because they have inadvertently picked up a young and very feisty Khazar prince whose death is being sought by the usurper Buljan. Our heroes, Amram the Abyssinian and Zelikman ben Solomon, the renegade scholar from Regensburg, suddenly find they must run for their lives as they seek to get the Khazar prince to safety and claim the expected reward. But the young prince has a few surprises of his own and the pursuing Muslim horsemen serving the Khazars prove feistier than the Jewish soldiers of fortune anticipated.
The story was initially serialized in the New York Times Sunday magazine section before being committed to book form, testifying to its somewhat self-referential and, certainly, its literary pretensions. In the old days it would have been serialized in some pulp fantasy or sword and sorcery venue but there aren't many of those around anymore and Chabon is a writer of mainstream fame -- so the Times it was. Chabon's apparently taken with the adventure form and this one is dedicated to old time sword and sorcery writer Michael Moorcock whose albino warrior hero, Elric Melnibone, finds echoes in the rail thin, wraith-like Zelikman (whose name resonates unsurprisingly with the Woody Allen character Zelig who manages to insert himself into the great events of the early twentieth century in the Allen film of that name). Zelikman is described as garbed in black and pale, with flowing blonde locks that make him appear almost ghostlike. His personality is ghostlike, too, for he is a dark fellow with a dreadful past who has lost faith in humanity and in the religion of his fathers. Still he is a more than able swordsman and a somewhat cynical thief prepared to prey on others' naivete. And yet this Zelikman retains a still human sympathy for others in need, not excluding his own kind as we learn when he stumbles onto a caravan of Jewish merchants including a few in their number from Regensburg.
When Amram and Zelikman aren't sniping at one another, Zelikman is smoking hashish to escape the grimness of the world around him and Amram is brooding over his lost daughter, blaming himself for failing to find her again. All this angst is very contemporary and adds an unexpected dimension to this old style adventure. But the story is so swift in its movement that we don't learn much more about the two protagonists than this as they race away from the pursuing horsemen, find violence and death wherever their horses take them and then become embroiled in the politics of the late Khazar Empire.
The record shows that the Khazars were finally destroyed by the Rus (precursors of today's Russians) in the mid tenth century and their empire was scattered to the winds, history losing track of them thereafter. But Chabon gives us a richly imagined Khazaria that feels almost real. Despite his tendency to skimp on narrative details as the story advances (one has to read the text very closely at times to follow the events), there is a robust feel to the Khazar backstory. I had a few quibbles, though, including his use of elephants in the storyline. In fact, there is no evidence at all that the Khazars ever kept or used elephants in war (the climate, with its harsh winters, wasn't right for this while the Khazars, themselves, were steppe horsemen, fighting in fast moving raids that elephants would have been useless in). Similarly, Chabon gives us the Rus attacking the coastal Muslim cities along the shores of the Caspian Sea with the connivance of the Khazar usurper, Buljan. While history does record such attacks they seem likely to have occurred much earlier, having largely ceased by the time Rus was an established state with its capital at Kiev on the banks of the Dnieper River in the west.
More, the Rus, who were of mixed Scandinavian-Slavic extraction, were basically vikings plying their piratical trade along the rivers and inner seas of this part of western Asia. And yet Chabon portrays them as using slave rowers to move their vessels along. This, too, seems ahistorical. The vikings rarely used slave rowers since their ships were small and they needed every hand they could get for fighting. In this part of the east they were known as Varangians (men of the oath), largely because they traveled in bands of freebooting adventurers bound together by an oath for the purpose of fighting and pillaging. Slave rowers would have been a drain on them, extra mouths to feed but without the willingness to fight or the will to row aggressively when the going got tough. The Varangians certainly indulged in slaving, as did all the peoples in this part of the world during this time, but it's much more likely they rowed their own fighting vessels just as their viking kinsmen did in the West. (Of course the record shows they did use slave rowers on trading expeditions down the Dnieper to Byzantium, for instance, but that was a different exercise than the swift raiding and hard fighting they had to engage in when making quick raids along an enemy's coast.)
But caveats aside, Chabon's book was a fun read and kept me going throughout. Not only was I fascinated by the way he visualized this little known part of the medieval world and resonantly evoked the old time adventure story in the process, I found the intelligent writing and the subtle allusions enjoyable as well. (Our heroes are strongly reminiscent of the offerings of another mid-twentieth century pulp writer, Fritz Lieber, whose huge barbarian fighter Fafrhd teams with the mysterious, diminutive thief and expert swordsman, the Gray Mouser, in many an adventure of their own; more, Chabon's entry to the adventure sweepstakes reminds me of L.Sprague de Camp's
The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate
, as well, which recounts the mad quest of an oversized Persian warrior, Bessas of Beriaspa, and his erstwhile sidekick, the would-be Greek philosopher Myron, in their odyssey into deepest equatorial Africa to find and deliver a dragon to Xerxes, Persia's King of Kings.)
I did have at least one literary quibble with Chabon though: I found his tendency to break up his dialogue by long digressions a bit much and would have preferred he drop this particular quirk. But it didn't seriously impede the story's progress which is, though ultimately no more than a light adventure, highly entertaining and richly colored throughout. I, for one, would not be averse to a continuation of these tales, particularly if Chabon can continue to capture and realize such long lost environs as he has done here.
SWM
(I am, by the way, author of an adventure tale of my own,
The King of Vinland's Saga
, a story of Norsemen in the New World circa 1050 AD -- about a hundred years after this tale takes place -- and so found myself with a special interest in seeing how Chabon did it.)
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