These 'Gentlemen' are swashbucklers, but little else

Michael Chabon's new novel is a good, old-fashioned buddy story -- emphasis on the old. "Gentleman of the Road" takes place in 950 A.D. and stars two unlikely Jewish comrades, a strapping Abyssinian named Amram and a skeletal, brooding Frank named Zelikman. The pair are itinerant swordsmen, horse thieves, and charlatans who hire themselves out as escorts for a fugitive prince, and wind up enmeshed in an unlikely rebellion in the Jewish empire of the Khazars.

The prince, an instigator named Filaq, convinces a retinue of Muslim mercenaries to help him overthrow the usurper Buljan, who has slain most of his family. Everything goes awry, naturally, though never quite in the way you expect.

The most striking aspect of the novel is its rococo style, which reads something like Kipling on steroids. Here is our introduction to Amram: "With his skin that was lustrous as the tarnish on a copper kettle, and his eyes womanly as a camel's, and his shining pate with its ruff of wool whose silver hue implied a seniority attained only by the most hardened men, and above all with the air of stillness that trumpeted his murderous nature to all but the greenest travelers on this minor spur of the Silk Road, the African appeared neither to invite nor to promise to tolerate questions."

Whether you find prose like this ecstatic or hysterically mannered is a matter of sensibility. Chabon has a boundless imagination, and takes obvious glee in portraying the mayhem wrought by his characters. A typical passage: "Most of all he was shocked by the pointless butchering of a stranded Rus, mute, dazed and trembling with some fever, white as a fish belly, who was dragged by the Arsiyah from his hiding place and slashed open like a gushing sack of wine."

I must be honest in confessing that I didn't quite understand all the plot twists or political intrigues. But that's not the point of an adventure. Chabon is interested in action here. He prefers the vivid to the lucid. (To this end, the book - which was originally serialized in The New York Times Magazine - includes illustrations.) That said, the most compelling moments of this brisk novel occur when the action relents. Zelikman's ministrations as a surgeon, for instance, are handled with a dignified precision, as is Amram's tender appraisal of Filaq: "It was the business of the world, Amram knew, to manufacture and consume orphans, and in that work fatherly love was mere dross to be burned away."

As a historical fiction, the book makes only glancing references to our present circumstance. Filaq's crusade is referred to as a religious war. If anything, it represents a wish fantasy: Muslims and Jews banding together to restore order to a fallen kingdom.

But the central relationship here, the one that seems to matter, is between Amram and Zelikman, who spend as much time bickering with each other as they do fighting the bad guys. Whatever else might happen, it's clear from the outset that these two are deeply in love. Here they are, reunited after one of many bloody interludes: Amram's "face was streaked with ash, ash lay on his hair and scalp and his eyes were crazed with pink. He came wincing down the steps of the mosque as if his back or hips were bothering him, and he and Zelikman fell into each other's arms." The late literary critic Leslie Fielder - who wrote about the homoerotic interracial undercurrents in American fiction - would have had a field day with these two.

Those who have followed Chabon's career will certainly find a rousing diversion here. If there's any moral to be extracted from the book, it's this: "There was no hope for an empire that lost the will to prosecute the grand and awful business of adventure." This might as well serve as a personal credo for the author, whose Afterward offers a defense of his decision to write adventure fiction. At this point, Chabon enjoys the prerogative of extraordinary talent. He can write whatever he pleases, as his far-ranging oeuvre attests.

But his notion that literary culture needs more adventure strikes me as dubious. We are living, after all, in a country overrun by "the grand and awful business of adventure," whether in Iraq or Hollywood's relentless epics of violence.

Literature, though, is about the tumult of people's emotions, more than the gallivanting of their bodies. Its power resides in the heart, not the glands. As much as I admired the exuberance of Chabon's picaresque, I had a hard time feeling much for his characters. I cop here to an antiquated bias: I prefer the adventures that occur inside people.

Steve Almond is the author of the new essay collection "(Not that You Asked)."

Gentlemen of the Road: A Tale of Adventure
By Michael Chabon Ballantine/Del Rey, 204 pp., $21.95