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While science fiction pioneers J.G. Ballard and William Gibson have gradually shrugged off the trappings of genre fiction, Michael Chabon has moved in the opposite direction, combining the values of "serious literature" with the escapist thrills of popular fiction.
As the Berkeley-based 44-year-old writes in the afterword of his latest publication Gentlemen of the Road (Hachette Livre), he has abandoned "the late-century naturalism" of his early work such as 1995's sophomore novel The Wonder Boys - where there was barely a gun in sight -in favour of "a little adventure".
Since then, Chabon has embraced everything from superheroes, in his Pulitzer prize-winning opus The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, to classic British murder mysteries in the Sherlock Holmes novella The Final Solution and Raymond Chandler-esque noir thrillers in last year's The Yiddish Policeman's Union.
"There's still a few genres left," laughs Chabon. "I haven't done romance, ghost, spy or jungle stories."
Gentlemen of the Road is similar in scope to Chabon's 2002 children's fantasy Summerland, which combined baseball with Native American and Norse mythology. This time he has drawn inspiration from the 19th century romantic capers of Alexandre Dumas and the sword and sandals epics of American pulp writers such as Conan The Barbarian creator Robert E. Howard.
"It's set about a thousand years ago in tune with Dumas and Howard but I don't have cavaliers," explains Chabon. "It's swashbuckling but in the sense that it's about the adventures of two rogues. If anything, it's closer in spirit to Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, but without any magic or fantasy elements."
Originally titled Jews with Swords, the story centres around two itinerant horse thieves, rakish Frankish Jew Zelikman and giant African Jew Amram, who ply their trade in the Kingdom of Arran -what is now known as Azerbaijan - around 950 AD, and also brings to mind George McDonald Fraser's scurrilous Flashman.
"They're sort of scoundrels," laughs Chabon. "But they're not as confirmed in their scoundrelness as Flashman."
Chabon originally wrote Gentlemen of the Road for the New York Times, which for the past two years has serialised new novels in its Sunday magazine.
"They called me up and asked me if I'd be interested," he says.
"It was good timing because I had this idea I'd been saving for a while and I wasn't sure what format it would take."
According to Chabon, the episodic nature of Gentlemen of the Road made for a very different challenge. "I was commissioned to write a 14-chapter novel and I wrote 15 chapters," he recalls. "Each had to be 2500 words long so I had to work it out very carefully. I plotted it out one chapter at a time and I had to work out how each chapter was structured in terms of ending on a cliffhanger or a certain note of doubt or uncertainty about what the next chapter was going to bring."
Chabon has so far resisted returning to any of the fantastic worlds he has created over the past decade, although he contributed to a comic book anthology of Kavalier & Clay's main superhero, The Escapist. However, he has considered telling more tales of the Gentlemen of the Road, perhaps chronicling the first meeting of Amram and Zelikman.
"I wouldn't ever rule it out but I don't have any plans to do that right now," he says. "I'm not writing anything right now and I'm not pragmatic in how I go about things. I don't have a sense of ticking things off a list. I don't really know where I'm going until I get there."
One thing that Chabon, who co-wrote the screenplay for Spider-Man 2 and spent 16 months labouring over a screenplay for a Kavalier & Clay film that has yet to be made, will not be doing in the foreseeable future is working on any more Hollywood projects. However, a film of his first novel Mysteries of Pittsburgh, directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber and starring Sienna Miller and Peter Sarsgaard, is due out next year.
"I was only informally involved in the Mysteries of Pittsburgh, whereas I wrote the script for Kavalier & Clay," says Chabon. "It's been interesting and I was intrigued by the whole prospect of going back to my first novel. But I'm not in the mood to do any more scripts right now.
"Film is a lot of work and it takes time away from everything else you're doing and once they've got you, they've got you. They put you on a treadmill and work you very, very hard."
- Detours, HoS
