Customer Reviews

Pirate Freedom

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Gene Wolfe is a god. He is the most brilliant writer alive. I have read and reread New Sun, Long Sun and Short Sun. If I were stranded on a desert island and could only bring one book, it would have to be Return To The Whorl, stylistically and intellectually the most sophisticated of the Short Sun trilogy. So it pains me to say that I was disapointed in Pirate Freedom. If it were written by someone other than my writing idol, Gene Wolfe, I would probably not judge it as harshly.

I felt that Wolfe was using a lot of tricks we had seen before, but using them badly, like some hack Wolfe-wanna-be. For example, the narrator's voice was very similar to that used in Wizard Knight; a modern day non-writer type stumbles into an unfamiliar realm and tells his own story in conversational language. There were phrases that were very similar to Horn/Silk from Short Sun. I wish I had kept a running total of how many times the main character, Chris, uses phrases similar to, "You will not believe me when I tell you...". I would estimate that he says it every 8 pages.

It is obvious from Wolfe's previous writing that he is a boat lover. He knows every thing there is to know about boats and relishes describing them in intimate detail. There is enough descriptive boat information here that this book could almost be classified as a sailing manual. I have no interest in boats, and this type of information would be very dry if it came from the pen of anyone other than Gene Wolfe. But because it is Gene Wolfe, his love for the subject becomes infectious.

My major complaint about Pirate Freedom is that it is told more as summary than as action. I felt as if maybe Mr. Wolfe did not want to invest in another trilogy or tetrology here, so he had to abbreviate all of the action.

Chris was on so many different ships and there were so many minor characters, that I found it hard to keep all the names straight by the end of the book. Wolfe can write books with casts of hundreds and make every last one of them a distinct and memorable figure, but he has not done it here.

I will say that this book held my interest from beginning to end, and I did love the ending. It was a nice, satisfying wrap-up. I know that if you are a Wolfe fanatic, you will read this no matter what I say about it. If you've never heard of Wolfe and just want an interesting read about pirates, you might like this book. If you have heard Wolfe is brilliant and you want to pick up one of his books, don't pick up this one. Go straight to the Urth books mentioned in the first paragraph. You won't be disappointed!

An interesting take on the pirate novel from Gene Wolfe. As other reviewers have mentioned, he recycles the narrative device from the Wizard-Knight in which the narrator recounts, in a conversational letter, events that occured after he was mysteriously transported to another time/place. In this case, the narrator is transported into the early 18th century Carribean, an era when Spain was the dominant sea power, and her ships plied the Atlantic bringing gold and other treasure from the New World.

After signing on as a seaman aboard a Spanish merchant ship returning to Spain from Cuba, he learns the basics of navigation and seamanship. Later, while re-crossing the Atlantic aboard the same ship, he and the rest of the crew are captured by pirates. Eventually, the narrator becomes a pirate captain himself.

On the positive side, the novel is fast-paced, held my attention, and I was easily able to finish it in a few days. The main problem with the book is that Wolfe tries to cram too much action into the 300 pages, and thus much of it seems rather cursory. In particular, the climactic voyage around Cape Horn from the Atlantic to the Pacific is covered in just a few pages. Similarly the final battle with the double-crossing band of pirates is covered in little over a page. It almost seemed like the author was struggling to meet a deadline.

The other problem with having so much action packed into so few pages is that there is no room for descriptive passages to make the reader feel they are actually there. When I read nautical fiction, I want to hear the thunder of the sails flapping in a 40 knot gale, and feel the sting of the salt spray as waves crash across the bow. There was none of that here. In fact, the Carribean seemed remarkably placid, in terms of weather, during the narrator's time as a pirate.

Similarly there was almost no description of how the pirates looked, how they dressed, what they did in their spare time, etc. There was no room for character development, and so it was difficult to feel that these were real people.

I guess this review sounds more critical than I initially intended. This is Gene Wolfe after all, and even bad Wolfe is better than 80% of what is out there.

For those interested in reading more fantasy literature about time travelling pirates, I would recommend James Branch Cabell's "There Were Two Pirates" There Were Two Pirates: A Comedy of Division

Wonderful! If the prospect of a straightforward Jolly-Roger-romp glazes you over, snap out of it, because this isn't one. It's a magnificent portrayal of a damned man, Father Chris, unflinchingly intent on preying upon his own younger self.

As a youth he committed many appalling acts. Circled round in time, Father Chris now needs this younger version to do the same things again, so that he can steal his woman from himself. The book is couched as Father Chris' long confession of the bad things he did when young; but it's a worthless confession, without repentance, and his intent really is to fool us into giving him our permission to make it all happen again.

As always with Wolfe, the pleasure lies in a combination of elegant prose, a beguiling narrative structure and substantial themes.

Those inclined to think of the story as "simple" might like to consider how Lesage goes so quickly from the sloop Windward to the three-master Bretagne, and how he happens to arrive at Rio Hato just when he does ... and why it is that Chris returns from the past to a date which must be very close to his birth date.

The storytelling is great, with all the action and narrative quirkiness (deceptiveness? probably not, given the narrator's character) we've come to expect from Wolfe. The principal problem is that it's not really original Wolfe--the key structural elements of the book are taken wholesale from THE KNIGHT: teenage American boy enters timeslip, finds himself in an alien world full of adventurous promise and moral quandaries, learns of love and grows up, then recounts said story to an unknown reader. It's the same book, only a different setting--just substitute 16th-century Caribbean seaboard for the fantastic realm of THE KNIGHT. So that was a detraction for me, much as I enjoyed the swashbuckling narrative.

The most interesting thing about the book for me was that it appeared to be Wolfe's most personal, and in particular most Catholic, novel to date (at least of the ones I've read). The narrator speaks both from his teenage perspective and from his latterday experience, and I seemed to hear the real-life Gene Wolfe speaking in the voice of Captain/Fr. Chris. Revealing, and touching: I was glad to see this more tender side of Wolfe given the asperities of some of his earlier work.

So altogether it's a very good book, but I subtract a star for the lower degree of difficulty.

This novel has the wit and depth you'd expect from Wolfe, but don't worry: it's an adventure story above all. The old lexicon of pirate stories is re-minted (you see the origins of words like "logbook" and "knots"), and the time-displaced narrator's experience feels authentic. Frankly I had no interest in historical pirates before this novel and I'm now casting around for the next good read, fictional or not, on buccaneers or the Spanish main. If you liked Severian's adventures in the Book of the New Sun, Silk's in the Long Sun series, or Able's in The Wizard Knight, this book is definitely for you. Like those earlier novels, Pirate Freedom is a bildungsroman featuring a clear-eyed, resourceful young hero managing to thrive in strange circumstances.

Gene Wolfe never ceases to surprise with with his choices of where to go next in his fiction. The far future or the ancient classical past? Wizards and knights in armor? So, when in this era of "Pirates of the Caribbean" perhaps the surprise of a pirate book by Gene Wolfe should not be a suprise. But of course, Gene Wolfe being Gene Wolfe, this is a book about a time-traveling (or at least time-slipping) pirate who is also a Catholic priest. There is perhaps no pirate story/movie cliche left untouched by Wolfe in this book, but also no cliche from which he does not strip away the fiction to show the kernal of truth within. I found the whole book a fascinating reading experience, more superficially approachable than the various "Sun" series novels, but nonetheless haunting and thought-provoking.

This book rewards close reading with careful attention to detail. There are a couple of other time-travelers involved besides the obvious one. If you find them, the book becomes much more entertaining and there are fewer coincidences in the plot.

Pirate Freedom is simple enough on the surface, but it stays with you after you read it and makes you want to pick it up again. Why? - Is it because you couldn't quite puzzle out side details of the plot, or because you have a sense of missing a deeper meaning. A seminarian of the future chooses to leave his order before vows. Unexplained Providence sends him into a life of "Pirate Freedom". This tale is told in flashback by the Priest - so compare his life in the present as Priest to his life in the past as Pirate for their relative "Freedoms". Ultimately, in either life, he is bound, not by treasure or vows, but by love. You will want to keep this book so don't wait for the paperback.

Father Christopher has had a curious youth. Educated at a monastery in post-communist Cuba (where his wise-guy father has moved to run a casino), he chooses not to take orders and leaves, only to find himself back in time (unspecified, but it's certainly the 1600s of the golden age of piracy). He finds street-life difficult and signs up as a sailor. With the mathematics and languages he'd learned at the monastery, he gains skills that lead him to become a seaman, then a navigator, a fighter and eventually a captain... and a buccaneer and pirate.

While I did find the narration by the main character often lacking in depth and detail, and true, the time-travel aspects weren't explained whatsoever, and some of the modern day thoughts and revelations often seemed to be strange digressions, the book was still a compelling read. I'm no stranger to sea adventure, particularly concerning buccaneers of the 17th. Century Caribbean, and although there was not much new in that way presented here, it was still an exciting tale.

The contrast of pirate life to the character's priestly business in the 21st. century is very curious and does add dimension as we try to reconcile it with modern sensibilities and the character deals with his religion and confessions, forgiveness, freedom and salvation. As a pirate he is free, literally the captain of his own fate, or at least he feels as if that is so. The allure of the life is catching, even though the downside of cruelty, violence, treachery and death are not avoided.

In some respects this feels like a good YA adventure tale, a worthy read as such, but there are those few extra layers for those who look for slightly more complex themes. And the resolution at the end was particularly satisfying.

Pirate Freedom is Wolfe's nod/homage to pirate adventure stories, drawing on traditions that range from Stevenson's Treasure Island, to Swift and Melville, and skewering things like modern Disney pirates. It is also, to a lesser extent, a time-travel story with a puzzle in it. Wolfe's trademark is writing in the first person and, in particular, Wolfe specializes in communicating things about his narrator that his narrator himself is unaware of. There is less of that here. But Wolfe is doing something else that he has done before to good effect.

Throughout his career, Wolfe has taken classic ideas or themes, combined them with ideas of his own, poured in a generous helping of unreliable narrator in order to create a breathtaking vision all his own. Often his works are the paragon of that particular type.

What I loved about this book is the deep detail and careful research that allows Wolfe to recreate the world of pirates in the 1500s. Couple that with some very sly pastiche of earlier work (he is nodding at classics of sea-faring fiction) and you have a very entertaining read.

If there is a downside here, it is that the story and its framework are a bit on the lightweight side--for Gene Wolfe. If you've found his other works difficult or impenetrable in the past, this is the Gene Wolfe novel for you.

On a final note, this was the first book I read on my Amazon Kindle.