Joseph's Reviews > The Journeyer

Famously (apocryphally?), Marco Polo, on his deathbed, said, "I have not told the half of what I saw and did!"

Based on Gary Jennings' The Journeyer, I can only conclude that the half of what he saw and did that he never told was based primarily around his wang.

(n.b. I haven't ever read the original The Travels of Marco Polo, and outside of Jennings' novel, my chief familiarity with the source material comes from the Netflix show, which I assume diverges even further from the source material.)

So: To Marco Millions and his naughty bits.

This book is Jennings' follow-up to Aztec, a very particular type of historical novel (that Jennings possibly pioneered?) that also includes such examples as Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth and Nicholas Guild's The Assyrian -- history treated almost in the style of a sprawling epic fantasy, and stuffed to the gills with sex and violence. (Any of the books mentioned could go toe-to-toe with A Game of Thrones on those counts.)

The book begins with Marco in his delinquent childhood, child of a noble house, running wild with Venetian street urchins because his father's away on his first expedition to the East, his mother is dead, and the servants are unwilling or unable to control him. Thanks to the aforementioned wang, he finds himself in a Venetian jail cell awaiting execution when his father fortunately arrives home and is able to convince the Doge to commute the sentence to banishment, at which point Marco, his father and his uncle set out on their great expedition to Kublai Khan's Mongol court, an expedition that will take them across the entire breadth of Europe and Asia, during which travels they'll encounter all manner of colorful (sometimes sinister) characters and have all manner of adventures, not all of which are wang-related.

As with Aztec (which I reread a couple of years ago for the first time in decades), I did enjoy this book quite a bit; and while I can't speak to its historicity, Jennings certainly seems to have done more than his share of research. Be warned that there are a few bits of relatively unsavory stuff (borderline child abuse, e.g.) that come up in passing even if Marco isn't directly participating; and his attitudes towards things are sometimes ... questionable, even if perhaps historically accurate. But with all that in mind, if you want a big, fat novel you can just lose yourself in, you could do much, much worse.