This book is simply gorgeous from start to finish. It’s the story of Sammy Klayman (Sam Clay) and Josef (Joe) Kavalier, two young Jewish cousins coming to adulthood in New York in the shadow of Hitler’s war in Europe and rampant anti-Semitism. They create The Escapist, the comic strip of a costumed superhero in the mode of Superman and Batman, who goes around the world liberating the oppressed, particularly from the Nazis.

The Escapist is, in particular, an outlet for our own hero, Joe, who has escaped from Prague but has had to leave the rest of his family behind to be ‘superintended’ by the Nazis. He suffers the guilt of the survivor as he struggles to find a way to get them out to safety and to negotiate happiness in his new life (meanwhile picking up his very own Nemesis in the tradition of all good costumed superheroes). Sammy is the sidekick, in that he gets less page-time and in other ways, but in the end it is he who becomes the hero when Joe runs and Sammy makes a sacrifice not even he knows the extent of.

OK, so that all sounds very depressing but the loveliness of this book is that it’s not at all: it’s funny and witty and fascinating and complex and thought-provoking and all those things which lift it above the prosaic life-sucks attitude of some dark-topic literary novels. The character sketches are works of art, the descriptions are so apt that I occasionally had to surface for air just to note how good they were (not that I paused to write any down so I could give you an example because I just wanted to keep reading it even once it was finished), the realism and woven-in true history is good enough to make me wonder who was and wasn’t fictional, Chabon is adept at dropping hints about what’s to come without being clumsy or frustrating, and the dialogue is perfect.

And I mean perfect: I don’t know how you subtly make the reader aware that two men appearing to be merely wisecracking with each other are actually flirting outrageously, but Chabon does it. It’s even better than that, because Sammy doesn’t know he’s flirting with the lovely, lovely Tracy Bacon (no wonder Sammy falls for him, I fell for him about half a page after he’s introduced). It’s just the reader and Tracy who know, and the lead-up to their first kiss on top of the Empire State Building in an electric storm…well! I haven’t read any kiss, hetero or otherwise, hotter than that for some time. Books don’t make me cry often, but after Sammy loses Tracy, every time his name is so much as mentioned in passing, I got teary, and stupidly hopeful.

I’m calling it two months early: this is my book of the year (my personal reading year, not year of publication; The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay won the Pulitzer Prize back in 2001).

Batman and Robin? That’s a dirty lie.

Chabon has written several books since this one, including The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, an alternate history novel that won a bunch of SF prizes, and the swashbuckler Gentlemen of the Road; he likes to mix literary and genre fiction. His website is here.

Interested? Buy it from Fishpond.com.au