Borders of the possible

The original title for this novel was Jews with Swords, which perfectly captures its spirit as well as its subject. It also, incidentally, suggests a good literary parlour game, in which classic works are simplistically renamed to reflect their content: Day Out in Dublin, for Ulysses, or Beautiful Child Abuse, for Lolita, perhaps.

In any case, the original title for Gentlemen of the Road is apposite, because it at once points to a historical period of weapon-wielding (10th-century Khazaria, as it happens) and offers a clue to the exuberant manner in which the tale is told. Michael Chabon is a literary novelist, but has here ‘gone off in search of a little adventure’ with a pleasurable crack at swashbuckling genre fiction.

It tells the story of two friends, Amram and Zelikman (the eponymous Gentlemen, or Jews), who make their living as thieves and fraudsters. Amram is a giant Abyssinian, who wields a heavy axe called ‘Defiler of Your Mother’; Zelikman is perhaps the perfect Jewish hero, being half adventurer (‘killer of men’), half responsible doctor (‘healer by nature’).