‘Gentlemen’ sad and spirited tale

“Gentlemen of the Road: A Tale of Adventure”

by Michael Chabon (Del Rey, 224 pages, $21.95)

“I am not overly encumbered by principle,” Zelikman, the gloomy Jewish physician, reminds Amram, the Abyssian.

“I am a gentleman of the road, an apostate from the faith of my fathers, a renegade, a brigand, a hired blade, a thief.”

Like his partner, Amram does not “stoop to politics” and thinks mercy a flaw, and a “terrible waste of time.”

Or do they? In Michael Chabon’s spirited, sad, and sumptuously written new novel, set in the Khazar Empire in the 10th century, these two brothers under the skin could have sold the callow young royal they’ve captured at the nearest slave market.

Instead, they risk their lives to help Filaq regain the throne from Buljan, the usurper.

Like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Zelikman and Amram are rootless and restless. Amram took to the road after Dinah, his daughter, walked to the shore of the river Birber with a basket of laundry and disappeared.

The Regensburg that Zelikman left was “cold and gray and green and rank with fog,” and hardly ever hospitable to Jews.

No strangers to violence, he and Amram would rather haggle or hoodwink than kill. They are lonesome doves, loyal to each other and their own code of honor.

“I want nothing to do with soldiers, armies, chains of command,” Zelikman tells his friend. “All the evil in the world derives from men acting in a mass against other masses of men.”

In saving lives, Zelikman broods, “I just prolong their futility.” But he joins Amram at Filaq’s side when the stripling asks for enlistments in “The Brotherhood of the Elephant.”

And so, Zelikman and Amram enter “the heart of the heart” of Chabon’s exquisitely imagined medieval world, with its circular brick tower set “in a glossy moat, within a ring of laurels, at the center of a vast courtyard of cyclopean flagstones,” and its “barbarous swaggering” Rus captain “whom the vicissitudes of the plunderous life had left only half a face.”

And – surprise! – after a plot twist or two “and the usual intrusions of violence and grace,” all’s right with the world, at least for the moment.

“Where will you go?” a comrade asks our heroes.

“It’s Amram’s turn to choose,” Zelikman replies, as he thinks about his father, who is dying in Regensburg.

The next morning the Abyssinian is waiting in the yard, “stamping his feet, complaining of the chill in bones that were too old for love and adventure.”

As they had done so many times before, the odd couple mounted their horses and left the city, their direction “of no interest to either of them, their destination already intimately known, each of them wrapped deep in his thick fur robes and in the solitude that they had somehow contrived to share.”