The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon (4 stars)

An audacious concept for even a writer of Chabon's pedigree: alt-history Jewish noir. The alt-history part is a realisation of one of the many proposed alternatives to a Jewish state in Israel. In this novel Chabon builds a very convincing Yiddish-speaking Jewish settlement in Alaska (as apparently actually proposed by FDR) at a time of turmoil: it is about to revert to US sovereignty.

The Jewish noir part plays out through the eyes of our protagonist: a long-suffering despondent Jewish police detective living in a flea bag hotel which also is the site of a murder.

So it's a clever, and tricky, plot premise, but the superstar of this, and any other, Chabon novel is the writing. It's glorious. There's literary gems like this all over the place:

In the street the wind shakes rain from the flaps of its overcoat. 

An invisible gas clouds his thoughts, exhaust from a bus left parked with its engine running in the middle of his brain 

Bringing that writing style to bear to Landsman's noir character produces this:

He picks up the shot glass that he is currently dating

But the truth is that Landsman has only two moods: working and dead.

The problem comes in the hours when he isn’t working, when his thoughts start blowing out the open window of his brain like pages from a blotter. Sometimes it takes a heavy paperweight to pin them down. 

But it's not all beautiful similes and metaphors. It's also chock-full of Yiddish slang, which adds a flavour of authenticity to the Alaskan settlement. It also adds a lot of reading complexity in the style of A Clockwork Orange, where you need to infer the meaning of Yiddish words from context and repetition.

Some reviewers suggest having a Yiddish dictionary handy, but I hate doing that. Interrupting the flow of prose to go look something up is a great way to turn a beautiful novel into a school assignment. So I didn't and I think my experience suffered somewhat: I remember thinking at one point: "is that phone or gun?" which is a fairly important difference when a character pulls it out of his pocket.

Like Kavalier and Clay, this is not a short novel. While I'm very happy to run my hands over the wood-grain and admire the fine joints and beautiful design of Chabon's craft, at some points I'd really just like the plot to move along. There were a number of times when my enthusiasm waned and I just wanted the pace to pick up.

When the pace does pick up and Landsman makes a one-man assault on the "bad" guys I was actually a little disappointed. The action and escape scenes seemed almost slapstick, and I felt like the novel lost it's gritty noir feel and traded it for Dan Brown-style secret hideout discoveries.

4 stars.