An unpromising land

The enjoyment you take in this novel will depend on what sort of animal you think the novel is. If you think novels are moral journeys, examinations of the troubles of the world, you will enjoy it as an ingenious example of the ‘alternate world’ fantasy. If you think they are principally aesthetic objects made out of language, you will enjoy it mostly as a dazzling game with styles and genres. Either way, there’s no denying the high hilarity and wit, in the largest sense, of this exceptional book.

Michael Chabon’s conceit is that the state of Israel was briefly founded, but was destroyed almost immediately, chased into the sea in 1948. The Jews of the world found a homeland instead in Alaska. Just as you start to think that that isn’t much of an alternate-world fantasy — it just seems to repeat history in a worse climate — Chabon adds a masochistic twist. The strip of Alaska was leased, like Hong Kong, for, in this case, a period of 60 years. The novel is set in the weeks before the lapse of the lease, as money-making American jackals and resentful Indians circle. The 60-year lease — an arbitrary detail, really — is going to display just how much the world hates the Jews, as they scrabble for some post-reversion foothold.

The alternate-world fantasy has provided some of the richest and most interesting fiction of the past 100 years. It arose out of pre-war prophetic fiction; authors who had written novels warning of the horrors of a German invasion gave way to ones like Philip K. Dick in The Man in the High Castle writing about a world in which the Germans didn’t lose.

The second world war has remained a favourite pivot for many alternate-world fantasists, because its success seemed in retrospect to rest on so many decisions which could have gone another way and so many personalities who could have failed to rise to power.