booklit

Looking at the cover of Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen Of The Road (2007) I was reminded of similar volumes consumed in my youth wherein lay the swashbuckling tales of Robin Hood or fragmented accounts of Sinbad’s voyages, often accompanied by black and white illustrations that highlighted scenes from the text. The subtitle being ‘A Tale Of Adventure‘ confirmed what the mountains and men on horseback implied: that within there was a journey. Like most adventures, there is a reward so, seeking mine, I saddled up and hit the road.

As the title of his 2001 Pulitzer winning The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay shows, Chabon is no stranger to adventure, and I’ve wanted to read his work for some time. But ever since a 2002 essay decrying most literary short fiction Chabon’s work has, apparently, become increasingly genre inspired and I’ve been loathe to try it. Nostalgia for those adventure books of old, however, won out.

As we meet the titular gentlemen they come separate to a tavern in order to swindle the locals. The only thing that connects them is that they are both Jews, for the first is Amram, a large African, his skin “as lustrous as the tarnish on a copper kettle”, and his companion is, Zelikman, a “Frankish scarecrow” and surgeon of sorts. Fooling the locals they are strangers, their insults soon devolve into a staged brawl, which gives Chabon the chance to write action and he does so in a pleasing way:

It was a contest of stamina against agility, and those who had their money on the former began with confidence in the favorite and his big Varangian ax, but the African, angered, grew gross and undiscerning in his ax-play. He shattered a huge clay jar full of rainwater, soaking dozen outraged travelers. He splintered the wheel spokes of a hay wagon, and as the solemn Frank danced, rolled and thrust with his slender bodkin, the berserker ax bit flagstones, shedding handfuls of sparks.

Once discovered, however, they find themselves on the road with an offer they can hardly refuse. A king’s ransom to deliver a youth named Filaq to the Khazars in Azerbaijan. What would seem an easy enough task is pandered by mercenaries sent to eliminate the youth for he is heir to the khaganate, although a rogue general seeks to sieze power. The road ahead is one of action and discovery - mostly action, though - and an ever increasing body count, culminating in a possible reason for why the Khazars converted to Judaism, something which history doesn’t know.

There are wonderful moments in the book, small lines here and there that force an image, Amran”reading the alphabet of horseshoe prints” after a scuffle, or humorous similes of doing something as “easily as a sailor handling a blasphemy”. But these snippets don’t supplement the whole in what is a boring, verbose, fool’s errand of a book, bogged down in Chabon’s efforts to emulate classic adventure books while adding a literary sheen.

I admit that on reading Gentlemen Of The Road I found myself reading passages again, trying to pick up the information they carried, but the many terms I found obscure (ostler? mahout) never allowed me to truly settle into the narrative. And every time I did so I wanted to quit the adventure, to pack up and go home. For all its flash pretensions of adventure and capturing the genre it seeks to sit alongside, it forgets to pack the most important thing for the road: excitement.

It has been my intention, for some time now, to read (and in some cases, reread) the works of John Steinbeck. Amongst his canon there’s a varied mix of fiction, essays, and journalism and I think it would be best to read them in sequence in order to experience Steinbeck’s progression as a writer. Thus I begin with Cup Of Gold (1929), Steinbeck’s first novel, and his sole piece of historical fiction, something he would later consider “an immature experiment”. By this he meant that it was the novel that had to be written by the fledgling writer in order to purge the influence of those who had gone before.

So what we have here is a Steinbeckian swashbuckler - just over two hundred pages yet epic in feel, the scope hinted at in the novel’s subtitle: A Life Of Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer, With Occasional Reference To History. In Cup Of Gold, Steinbeck sets out to write a fictional account of the famous pirate’s life - from boyhood to death - and, despite its faults, he delivers.

It begins, in Wales, where the fifteen year old Henry Morgan lives on the farm with his parents. One night a former farmhand - who had left years before for the Indies - returns and tells of his adventures, the excitement of which spark young Morgan to make the decision to leave home and make his fortune overseas. While his father feels he cannot stop his boy from leaving home, his mother has a hard time letting him go, for she believes him still her little boy and, as regards his notion to become a seaman, “such matters as had so obviously no connection either with the church or with the prices of things were plainly nonsense.”

Before finalising his decision to leave for the Indies, Morgan is encouraged to talk with the local Cambrian hermit, a man who borrows the name of Merlin. After a brief conversation full of cryptic wisdom and prophcies, it is decided that Morgan could be famous, as long as he remains childish in his dreams:

“You are a little boy. You want the moon to drink from as a golden cup; and so, it is very likely that you will become a great man - if only you remain a little child. All the world’s great have been little boys who wanted the moon; running and climbing, they sometimes caught a firefly. But if one grow to a man’s mind, that mind must see that it cannot have the moon and would not want it if it could - and so, it catches no fireflies.”

And so the life of Morgan continues, first to a bar in Cardiff where his first experiences of the world at large are revealed to him in the chattering of myriad languages and “the colors of faces from beef red to wind-bitten brown.” Then, through his naivete, Morgan finds himself working his passage to the Indies only to be sold into slavery when he arrives there. But, undeterred, he works his sentence, never letting his dream of being a buccaneer fade, and in this time he grows from innocent boy to ruthless man who, as Merlin predicted, wanted the moon.

The moon, in this instance, is a woman famed for her beauty, named La Santa Roja - yet it is also Panama, the ‘Cup of Gold’ of the title. After the many skirmishes at sea that have built his reputation, Morgan sets his sights upon wresting Panama from Spanish hands and gaining untold of fortune. It’s a masterplan in tactics that sees many deaths before opposing sides even clash, due to starvation and the cruel terrain. But when the city is sacked, Morgan finally finds himself in the company of La Santa Roja, and despite all of his effortless conquests she proves to be more his match, reducing him to a man that no longer wishes the moon.

As Steinbeck novels go, Cup Of Gold is an enjoyable but average romp around the Caribbean. The language that would grace later works is certainly evident but not all characters feel fully fleshed. Dialogue, also, is a little off. But, to the novel’s credit there are sections where Steinbeck eschews the narrative to give historical asides to topics such as the rise of English presence in the Indies, marking out England as ruthless and ingenious as Morgan himself:

…felons were gathered out of the prisons, and vagrants from the streets of London; beggars who stood all day before the church doors; those suspected of witchcraft or treason or leprosy or papism; and all were sent to work the plantations under orders of indenture. It was a brilliant plan; the labor needed was supplied, and the crown actually received money for the worthless bodies of those it once fed and clothed and hanged. More could be made of this.

While it’s probably a novel for Steinbeck completists, Cup Of Gold contains elements that were forever interests to him, namely piracy and Arthurian legend. It stands well on its own and its historical context ensures that it will never truly date - although it felt more like a myth than a proper history given the tracts of dialogue characters would reel off, full of experience, knowledge, and superstition. But it’s a fine meditation on money and love and of what can be achieved when the mind is determined - a minor Steinbeck treasure worth plundering.