A treasure trove of adventure

It does nothing to slight either Michael Chabon or his slyly entertaining new novel, “Gentlemen of the Road: A Tale of Adventure,” when I say that 10 pages into it, I began to think of another book and another writer.

On my 10th birthday, my parents gave me the wonderful edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island” that N.C. Wyeth illustrated. It was a Friday evening, and after the post-dinner chocolate cake and candles, I went to my room, opened my new book and was immediately and irremediably in its thrall. My indulgent parents eventually went off to bed, pretending not to see the flashlight glowing under my covers. There was a bad moment shortly before dawn, when the batteries began to fail, but I moved to the windowsill and read on by daybreak’s first gray light. Finally, just as the sun rose, I thrillingly -- but sadly -- came to those great final paragraphs with the protagonist Jim’s last words on Long John Silver, his parrot -- Captain Flint -- and the pirate for whom the bird was named:

“Of Silver we have heard no more. That formidable seafaring man with one leg has at last gone clean out of my life; but I dare say he met his old negress, and perhaps still lives in comfort with her and Captain Flint. It is to be hoped so, I suppose, for his chances of comfort in another world are very small.

“The bar silver and the arms still lie, for all that I know, where Flint buried them; and certainly they shall lie there for me. Oxen and wain-ropes would not bring me back again to that accursed island; and the worst dreams that ever I have are when I hear the surf booming about its coasts, or start upright in bed, with the sharp voice of Captain Flint still ringing in my ears: ‘Pieces of eight! pieces of eight!’ ”

It was an adventure like no other I’d ever read -- gripping, but ambiguous. Silver, the archvillain, had escaped easy cinematic justice to a life of comfort with his mistress. Jim, the boy hero, had experienced a great adventure that left him with nightmares. I’d been entertained and left with something to think about. (It’s no accident that Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov held Stevenson in such high regard.) Later that year, my forays into the library would yield up Alexandre Dumas’ “The Three Musketeers” and all their intrigue, and Fritz Leiber’s seminal “sword and sorcery” work, “Two Sought Adventure,” with its cynically swashbuckling protagonists, Fafhrd and Gray Mouser.

From that day to this, I’ve never lost my confidence in the novel’s unique ability to provoke and stir us, while keeping us completely entertained.

One of the several pleasures of reading “Gentlemen of the Road” is that it reminds us all of the novel’s intrinsic power to do all that. Moreover, according to Chabon, he reread Dumas and Leiber before embarking on this altogether enjoyable and thought-provoking new book. In part, he must have been drawn to Dumas because, like “The Three Musketeers,” “Gentlemen of the Road” initially was written as a newspaper serial -- in this case, 15 parts that appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine from January to May.

Some appropriate rewriting has gone into this edition -- evocatively illustrated with period pen-and-ink drawings by Gary Gianni -- but the serial’s breakneck, dramatic pace has been preserved. Our tale is set in the Kingdom of Arran (roughly the Karabakh region of contemporary Azerbaijan) around AD 950. Our protagonists are a pair of Jewish adventurers. One is the hulking Ethiopian, Amram, who seems to care for shatranj (the ancient Persian version of chess), women and his Viking battle-ax (“Mother Defiler”) in that order. His companion is the Frankish Jew Zelikman, physician and swordsman, who -- despite his dissolute life -- is still half under the spell of his uncle, the sage of Regensburg. Zelikman’s preferred recreation is his afternoon pipe of hemp. (Right -- shades of Sherlock Holmes. This is knowing stuff.)

Together, Amram and Zelikman become involved with the youthful claimant to the throne of Khazars, the great Turkic tribe that, in the early Middle Ages, converted to Judaism and established a martial empire in the Caucasus, holding the balance of power between Byzantium, the Persians, the expanding Islamic caliphate and the Rus pushing south.

A brutal usurper has seized power among the Khazars, and Amram and Zelikman soon find themselves only partially willing generals in an insurgency to place on the throne a princeling who doesn’t turn out to be quite what he seems to be.

Chabon, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his evocation of America’s prewar comic-book culture, “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” is a marvelously gifted writer who brings to his work not only an unself-conscious mastery of technique but also a knowing intelligence born of deep and fearless reading. He has impeccable literary fiction credentials, which give him the street cred to treat genre fiction such as “Gentlemen of the Road” in the same way he treats all of his books’ characters: with respect but not piety.

You get a sense of what he’s about with chapter titles that evoke the 19th century by putting good-natured tongue in affectionate cheek. Thus: “On the Substitution of One Angel and One Cause, for Another” and “On the Melancholy Duty of Soldiers to Contend With the Messes Left by Kings.” He’s also not shy about transfusing a good strong dash of tasteful sex, profanity and cynicism into the genre.

Here Zelikman -- debating strategy -- draws on the physician’s experience that tells him, “I can only save men one at a time.” Though he is “an apostate from the faith of my fathers,” he must abide by the medical lesson: “I must hold firm: if we can only save them one man at a time, then by God we must only kill one man at a time.”

When their princeling client arrogantly disagrees, Amram chimes in: “Not even in power yet and already thinking like a despot.”

There’s a great deal of smart and sophisticated enjoyment to be had from “Gentlemen of the Road” -- and something more. In a provocative and revealing afterward, Chabon says that he originally intended to title this novel “Jews With Swords.” In fact, like his last book, “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” which used the conventions of the hard-boiled detective story to imagine an alternative Zionist future in which the Jewish state was located in Alaska, “Gentlemen of the Road” is part of a fictive meditation on Jewish identity and popular artistic culture.

Chabon has some telling and provocative things to say about that, which shouldn’t be spoiled by quoting his last thoughts. Suffice to say that after you’ve finished thoroughly enjoying his novel, it’s worth making time for the writer’s thoughts on its context.

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timothy.rutten@latimes.com