Gentlemen of the Road – Michael Chabon (Sceptre)
I followed Chabon blindly into Gentlemen of the Road, fairly disinterested in the genre but in love with the way he knots words and punctuation into an impossible tangle and then – ta-da! – pulls the whole thing out clean before your very eyes.
There’s plenty of that in Gentlemen of the Road, unsurprisingly, but what really struck me was how much Chabon’s style is actually a perfect fit for this kind of historical-bordering-on-fantasy adventure story.
His overrunning sentences can’t help but fill every character, event, setting, and even object with its own history and internal life. In fantasy, you’d call that ‘world-building’ or 'lore’ – a tendency I’ve often identified as tedious – but it’s just Chabon’s natural mode of writing, part of the way he brings the buzz of genre writing to even his most traditionally 'literary’ work.
