I was halfway through the audiobook of Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road, narrated by Andre Braugher, when I just stopped listening for no specific reason that I can remember now. It’s not particularly long and I had a good bit of driving over the last couple of days, so I went back to the start and finished it this morning.
This is known as a fun historical adventure tale in the pulp tradition (it was originally published in serialized form). It certainly has a great setting, 10th century Khazaria (now southwest Russia), and plenty of the classic swashbuckling elements (well, okay, I have no idea if elephants are part of that tradition, but if not, they should be).
However, unlike apparently everyone else in the world, I found this ultimately a bittersweet, somewhat melancholy experience. The narrative is keenly aware of the constraints that its characters live under, and while its ending is as happy as it could be—or perhaps even a bit more so, really—somewhat perversely, that had the effect of highlighting just how the narrow the scope of that ending was, and how much I would have liked it to be different.
I was also disappointed in Braugher’s reading on this listen, finding it faster and flatter than I would have liked. However, when someone gets to deliver dramatic dialogue, he unsurprisingly does very well.