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I’m a bit behind on my articles.  I finished the Graveyard book five or six days ago, but only got it out as an article two days ago.  I started reading The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, by Michael Chabon, almost immediately after and I finished it two days ago.  I’m currently reading a book on interstellar propulsion technologies.  I’ll probably finish that in a few days and won’t get an article out for weeks.  Oh, and I also read a book about terraforming.  I have no idea when I’ll finally write about that one.

The cover is gorgeous.  It’s probably the most aethesthetically interesting and appropriate cover I’ve ever seen.  Michael Chabon is an established author so they seem to have given him the royal treatment.

Admittedly, I have no read any of his previous works.  I picked this one up predominately on the fact that it won the 2007 Nebula Award for  Best Novel.

It’s a truly strange book.

Set in an alternate timeline where only the Bomb stopped Germany and Israel collapsed, the Jewish diaspora is given a temporary home in Sitka, Alaska.  Forty years later the territory is set to revert to Alaskan control.  Meyer Landsman, a Sitka cop, has a crime on his hands and a world crumbling around him.

That’s the short synopsis, but it leaves a lot in the air.  It’s around 600 pages, my copy, and half of them are Yiddish.  That’s an exageration, but enough of the the names,the places and, most frustratingly, the words are in Yiddish that reading the thing requires either a working knowledge of that language, enough dedication to look them up, or enough flexibility to simply fly over them and hope the meaning becomes obvious.

As a science fiction story and an alternate timeline one at that, there is the expectation that I’ll be tossed into a world where things are somewhat confusing.  That’s just part of what science fiction is about.  Skimming over the Amazon reviews, a lot of the readers are people that have followed Michael Chabon, instead of science fiction, and they haven’t much cared for what they’ve found.  They consider the book and jumbled mess and have pretty much left it at that.

I wouldn’t consider that a particular fair appraisal.  The book does get confusing, but it’s not because of the alternate timeline aspects or Jewish culture or even the base plot.  The book is confusing because it’s written in what I can only describe as the most peculiar style I’ve come across in a modern book.  Third person present tense writing just happens to be somewhat obscure.  ’Meyer Landsmen looks across the room and sees Beronshtyn.’  For the first two hundred pages that tense and tone alone kept me thoroughly offguard.

I finished the book and as I got deeper I managed to absorb the writing.  It’s an odd style, but it works.  In some places it seems terribly awkward.  You have the intimacy of the first person tense, but with too many names being thrown around.

Further along the plot seems to take larger and larger leeps.  By the end, I admit that, not very much of it seemed plausible.  It kept along a nice, though slow, pace for most of the book, but the last third hung by a few tenuous strings until it ended with something of a thud.  I wouldn’t say I disliked the book, but I would hardly call it fulfilling.  It was like the first book in a trilogy ending cliffhanging that’s too final and too uninspiring.  By the end I was pretty much tired with the characters.  They’d gone through their change at snail’s past and what they really needed was a long nap.

From this book and from the reviews I’ve read Mr. Chabon seems to be a very talented writer and rather adventurous as far as his style and topics.  This particular novel might have fallen a bit flat, bit I’ll have to keep an eye out for another book of his.