Culture

Author: Michael Chabon
Publisher: Fourth Estate
3/5

Maps and Legends weaves a delicate and very personal group of essays into a book extolling the virtues of reading and writing. Michael Chabon is a bestselling author of novels and short stories; he won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. This latest effort consists of 16 essays commenting on various sections of the writing community. The essays are on a broad range of subjects, from short stories to Norse gods, from the heyday of the comic book to post-apocalyptic science fiction. For each one, Chabon uses one of his favourite authors or works to provide a worthy illustration of the possibilities that are open to both readers and writers alike. He finishes the book with the transcript of a speech he performed throughout 2003 and 2004 which obliquely hints at the construction of stories, the intermingling of truth and lies, and the eccentricities of memory.
Chabon is obviously passionate about the material and this, at times, can be his undoing. To start with, he seems to possess an encyclopaedic knowledge of literature gathered through a lifetime of voracious reading (the index of authors that are mentioned in the book runs to eight pages long). Without the same knowledge, the reader might find it hard to fully appreciate what is being said. Consequently, I found the chapters discussing authors I knew well to be the most rewarding, notably a mini biography on Arthur Conan Doyle and a chapter on the most important aspects of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. As well as the knowledge gap, the language can be a bit of a struggle. Chabon is writing on very personal ideas that sometimes become bewilderingly complex. One sentence I counted was 188 words long which, to put it into context, is fully half the length of this whole review.
Despite its faults I still think this book is well worth a read. What I finally took away from Maps and Legends is Chabon's own feeling that the world is both awful and wonderful all at once and literature, be it in any form, is at its peak when it successfully shows us the best and worst that humanity has to offer.