THE PAWN AGAINST THE KING

A clever pawn squares off against an arrogant king in Katsoulas’ winsome chess-themed fable.

A puissant monarch called the White King puts out a call for a brilliant strategic game with very high stakes; the inventor will be showered with gold if the King likes the game, but enslaved if he doesn’t. Accepting the challenge is a figure called the black pawn, who offers up his own entry: chess. Most of the book consists of the black pawn describing to the King the rules of chess and the movements of the pieces, which he symbolically links to real battles. The pawns, he explains, are like peasant foot soldiers plodding forward step by step; the rooks’ sweeping mobility makes them as important as castles; the knights’ L-shaped moves and ability to leap over blocking pieces exemplify the tricky, oblique thinking needed to outsmart opponents. Some features of the game please the White King, but others annoy him—especially the fact that the queen is so much more mobile than the king. (The black pawn deflects his pique by belittling the queen and talking up the king’s importance: “Let the woman think that she does whatever she wants. Let her saunter and wander around wherever she wants, whenever she wants and on whichever color she prefers. However, if she gets killed, the fight continues….But if the King falls…then it’s all over.” Finally satisfied that chess is indeed a fine game, the White King offers the black pawn 30,000 gold coins as a reward. Instead, the pawn requests the seemingly measly recompense of a single gold coin placed on the first black square of the chessboard, with each successive black square to get double the coins of the preceding one. The White King gleefully accepts this payment scheme—thus setting himself up for an expensive lesson on geometrical increase.

Katsoulas’s slender narrative serves as a beguiling introduction to the rules and spirit of chess. The conversation between the black pawn and the White King itself unfolds as a kind of rhetorical chess match as the pawn tries to parry the skeptical King’s complaints and keep him interested in the game by sidestepping his stupidity and playing to his vanity. It’s also an evocative love letter to the infinite complexity of chess. (“[Y]ou can opt for a war of attrition by making small moves, thus creating a solid pack that will withhold any counterattack,” the black pawn tells the White King; “If you prefer an attacking game, you can start by eating up pieces even if they are supported. This way, the defences open up, and the game obtains a wild beauty, since the Kings are left exposed.”) Writing in limpid, resonant prose, Katsoulas invests the happenstances of the game with a deeper meaning. (“My Lord, it is certainly a demeaning way to die, not fit for an Excellency; but it happens,” the black pawn explains when the White King objects that even a miserable pawn can checkmate the king. “How many kings haven’t had a humiliating death? How many kings weren’t assassinated sneakily by moles or traitors or even their own blood?”) Chess lovers will smile at this captivating homage to an engrossing game.

An entertaining meditation on chess as a metaphor for life that celebrates the triumph of wits over power.