Book review: The Yiddish Policemen's Union

Michael Chabon's books took a while to end up available for kindle so I'm fairly behind with them. The Yiddish Policemen's Union is one of his best-regarded novels, a Chandleresque crime story set in a slightly alternate universe: After the Second World War, the Jewish homeland was set up not in Israel, but Alaska (apparently Franklin D. Roosevelt genuinely proposed this.) In addition, the Sitka district was established with a built-in expiration date of 60 years, and when the time is up (a deadline that's a couple of months away when the novel starts) America wants it back, and only a few of the residents will be allowed to stay on. So it's in the middle of an allegory for the Jewish experience of being forever unwanted and moved on that Chabon tells his story of Detective Landsman, likely to be out of a job when Reversion comes, and having to spend those remaining months working for his ex-wife, who's been promoted above him.

Landsman lives in a seedy hotel and when one of the other residents is found murdered in his room with a half-played chess game next to the body, he takes a personal interest in the case (despite, or perhaps because of, his own hatred for chess, so the case also makes him look into his own history.) Together with his half-Eskimo partner he ends up caught up in a slightly surreal world of Orthodox Jewish mobsters and an attempt to make the Messiah come to Earth through terrorism. I'm not a huge fan of the noir genre so this wasn't a natural fit for me; I enjoyed parts of it and its sometimes bizarre imagery, and there's a nicely haunting atmosphere to it, but it's very bleak - certainly a contrast to the blurb's suggestion that it's a funny book: There is dark, wry humour but it's not the prevailing tone of an extremely melancholy novel.