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A review by rbreade
Gentlemen of the Road: A Tale of Adventure by Michael Chabon
Dedicated to Michael Moorcock, to whose Elric stories, as well as to Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser tales, this novel functions as a love letter--with one difference. Whereas both Moorcock and Leiber wrote within the sword and sorcery subgenre of fantasy, Chabon opts for swords sans sorcery in this story set ca. 950 CE in that area between the Black and Caspian Seas.
The language is suitably rococo, with Chabon successfully taking on some of the tone often found in such tales of swashbuckling and derring-do, though because this is Chabon, said language is uniformly fresher than is usually encountered in either fantasy or science fiction.
Two examples among many to demonstrate what I mean by rococo and fresh:
At one point, a young man is described as "a would-be sharp operator who lacked for the satisfaction of his ambition only the quality of sharpness and who expended all his energies...on preserving his opinions from contamination by experience."
Elsewhere: "The agent only nodded his head and smiled a Radanite smile, which was not a smile at all but rather a promissory note to deliver one at some unspecified future date."
The language is suitably rococo, with Chabon successfully taking on some of the tone often found in such tales of swashbuckling and derring-do, though because this is Chabon, said language is uniformly fresher than is usually encountered in either fantasy or science fiction.
Two examples among many to demonstrate what I mean by rococo and fresh:
At one point, a young man is described as "a would-be sharp operator who lacked for the satisfaction of his ambition only the quality of sharpness and who expended all his energies...on preserving his opinions from contamination by experience."
Elsewhere: "The agent only nodded his head and smiled a Radanite smile, which was not a smile at all but rather a promissory note to deliver one at some unspecified future date."