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3.51 AVERAGE
3.51 AVERAGE
adventurous
challenging
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Pretty fun little novel, lot of the hallmark Wolfe traits: the childlike narrator omitting important events, female tricksters/murderers, etc etc.
Overall I enjoyed it, although I do wish Wolfe wasn't so damn sneaky about what was happening in the 'real' plot in modern day life.
Overall I enjoyed it, although I do wish Wolfe wasn't so damn sneaky about what was happening in the 'real' plot in modern day life.
Like all Gene Wolfe books, the best you can ever say is that you have a vague idea of everything that is going on. This is one of his simpler books, and there is much enjoyment to be had from just reading it. There is, however, much more from trying to figure out what is really going on.
As one of my favorite authors, I will freely admit that Gene Wolfe has not written a great book in a decade (since the Short Sun books). However, Pirate Freedom was still a good book. I enjoyed the descriptions of sailing, hard living, and sea battles. In many ways, this book resembles another of his recent books "The Knight", as in its about a man from modern world traveling through time and space to be somewhere else (fairie land vs pirates of Caribbean).
One neat thing were the old school half page pencil drawings with a pirate theme that began every chapter. As I ponder getting an E-reader, I feel like drawing like these will be missed in electronic version of the book.
One neat thing were the old school half page pencil drawings with a pirate theme that began every chapter. As I ponder getting an E-reader, I feel like drawing like these will be missed in electronic version of the book.
This is my first reread on this and I'm hard pressed to figure out where to classify it.
It has all the standard Wolfeian aspects: there's an unreliable narrator who plays down his intelligence when he's clearly very smart. There's a couple of rounds of mystery that the clever reader can solve given the clues available. There's some playing with the narrative structure in terms of timeframes and expectations that again, can be figured out if you're paying attention.
It's also fairly brutal. Wolfe does nothing to play down or romanticize the actions of the pirates in this period. The narrator calls out his own violence and the tortures performed by his men, the cold realities of the slave trade and so on, and then finds ways to absolve himself of some of it - that Chris is the child of a Mafioso and is able to translate the pirate environment to the Mafia environment as a foundation of understanding works well in the text - and seeks Christ's mercy on the rest. This is very much Wolfe writing as Catholic, and the hardest parts of the book were the character trying to deal with the very obvious failures of the Catholic church in the period when Wolfe was writing it in terms of sheltering criminals and the social implications of that. It's hard to tell how much is Wolfe's own opinions and how much is Chris as raised Mafioso turned Pirate talking up the need for men to be tough.
That runs into the other issue with the book, which is like many of his other works this is a deceptively dense text with the veneer of Boys Own Adventure Story. Our hero is smart and tall and strong and fast and clever and humble and all the women love him. OK, fine, unreliable narrator, self deprecating text, there's a reason in story for why Chris is so physically powerful , I get it. But too much of the plot hinges on every woman he meets falling for him and fighting over one another for his attentions that it's not just unreliable narrator humblebragging but instead credulity-straining coincidences that snapped me out of the story.
It's not one of his best works, but I remember enjoying it more the first time i read it. Maybe it's that in 2021 I'm looking for a little more romanticism and less brutality in my fantasy, but at the same time I appreciate not softening the truth of the Pirate culture - like Vampires, they really should stay among the bad guys....
It has all the standard Wolfeian aspects: there's an unreliable narrator who plays down his intelligence when he's clearly very smart. There's a couple of rounds of mystery that the clever reader can solve given the clues available. There's some playing with the narrative structure in terms of timeframes and expectations that again, can be figured out if you're paying attention.
It's also fairly brutal. Wolfe does nothing to play down or romanticize the actions of the pirates in this period. The narrator calls out his own violence and the tortures performed by his men, the cold realities of the slave trade and so on, and then finds ways to absolve himself of some of it - that Chris is the child of a Mafioso and is able to translate the pirate environment to the Mafia environment as a foundation of understanding works well in the text - and seeks Christ's mercy on the rest. This is very much Wolfe writing as Catholic, and the hardest parts of the book were the character trying to deal with the very obvious failures of the Catholic church in the period when Wolfe was writing it in terms of sheltering criminals and the social implications of that. It's hard to tell how much is Wolfe's own opinions and how much is Chris as raised Mafioso turned Pirate talking up the need for men to be tough.
That runs into the other issue with the book, which is like many of his other works this is a deceptively dense text with the veneer of Boys Own Adventure Story. Our hero is smart and tall and strong and fast and clever and humble and all the women love him. OK, fine, unreliable narrator, self deprecating text, there's a reason in story for why Chris is so physically powerful , I get it. But too much of the plot hinges on every woman he meets falling for him and fighting over one another for his attentions that it's not just unreliable narrator humblebragging but instead credulity-straining coincidences that snapped me out of the story.
It's not one of his best works, but I remember enjoying it more the first time i read it. Maybe it's that in 2021 I'm looking for a little more romanticism and less brutality in my fantasy, but at the same time I appreciate not softening the truth of the Pirate culture - like Vampires, they really should stay among the bad guys....
adventurous
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I need to re read this sometime so I can figure out WTF is actually going on.
Also some of the one star reviews of this on here are HILARIOUS.
Also some of the one star reviews of this on here are HILARIOUS.
Gene Wolfe is mainly known as a science fiction and fantasy writer, but his 2007 novel Pirate Freedom applies only a thin fantasy veneer over a rip-roaring adventure story that must have sprung from some intensive reading on 17th-century pirates in the Caribbean. The narrator is Fr. Christopher, a Roman Catholic priest in an American city who, we soon discover, has an unusual life story. Brought to a post-Communist Cuba as a boy (in some near future of ours), he was schooled at a monastery high school/seminary. Stepping out of this monastery upon reaching maturity, he finds himself cast back in time from the 21st century to the age of sail. Seeing how cruelly the Spanish treat the French and English with whom they vie for the Caribbean, Christopher decides to become a pirate and plunder the Spanish of the wealth they are extracting from the New World.
That setup will probably strike many readers as lame, and indeed the book is overall very lame. The strong aspect of the book is its depiction of Caribbean piracy and seafaring in general in an era that, on the basis of clues in the text, must be dated between 1671 (Henry Morgan's burning of Panama City) and 1792 (the Port Royal earthquake). There is all kinds of little trivia here that I wanted to follow up on the big online encyclopedia. The book acts as something to a corrective to the "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise that was so popular around the time of its publication.
All in all, however, Pirate Freedom is a poor effort. This book features the extremely tiresome adventure story trope where an ordinary American dropped into an unfamiliar environment is able to defeat adversaries in hand-to-hand combat with ease, even if they are warriors who have spent their whole lives training for battle, and of course he's a hit with the ladies and beds some. Christopher is an outsider to this entire world, but almost immediately everyone wants to elect him captain and serve him to their last breath.
Interspersed with Fr. Christopher's account of his past are his comments on his ministry in the America of our time. This strand of the narrative exists essentially for Wolfe to grumble about contemporary mores, especially the state of the Roman Catholic Church. When Fr. Christopher speaks of the scandals of priests molestating children, Wolfe puts "children" in quotation marks, claiming that the victims are mostly teenage males, and the sex abuse would stop if they were simply encouraged to fight as lads in the 17th century were (from his reading, Wolfe had noticed that many pirates were younger than is usually depicted today). Also, he gets in a few digs at language modernizers (priests who say "people" instead of "men") and clergy who discourage the Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament ritual. Wolfe has often used Christian themes and symbolism in his books, but here his repeated mention of the Roman Catholic Church specifically is likely to turn a lot of readers off.
Finally, Pirate Freedom shares problems common to all of Wolfe's work since the 1990s. The prose is written at a grade-school level. In his early masterpieces (The Fifth Head of Cerberus, The Book of the New Sun), Wolfe wrote some of the most intricate and crafted prose in English, equal to Proust or Nabokov. but this book reads like a self-published effort by someone who has never written anything before. Wolfe wants to hint that Christopher's father has a mafia background, and he does this, inconsistently and in just a few spots in the narrative, by sprinkling Christopher's dialogue with Hollywood mafia stereotypes: "Hey, you goomba!", "Capeesh?", "Wiseguy". Also, there is a feeling that Wolfe can't fully concentrate on fleshing out the narrative, with many events simply skipped over and summarized later in a couple of lines. Wolfe was well into his 70s when writing this, and unfortunately it shows.
While young adult readers may find Pirate Freedom entertaining, anyone who has followed Wolfe's career is likely to be disappointed. When critics call Wolfe being one of the greatest writers alive, they are really talking about books published decades before post-millennial stinkers like this one.
That setup will probably strike many readers as lame, and indeed the book is overall very lame. The strong aspect of the book is its depiction of Caribbean piracy and seafaring in general in an era that, on the basis of clues in the text, must be dated between 1671 (Henry Morgan's burning of Panama City) and 1792 (the Port Royal earthquake). There is all kinds of little trivia here that I wanted to follow up on the big online encyclopedia. The book acts as something to a corrective to the "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise that was so popular around the time of its publication.
All in all, however, Pirate Freedom is a poor effort. This book features the extremely tiresome adventure story trope where an ordinary American dropped into an unfamiliar environment is able to defeat adversaries in hand-to-hand combat with ease, even if they are warriors who have spent their whole lives training for battle, and of course he's a hit with the ladies and beds some. Christopher is an outsider to this entire world, but almost immediately everyone wants to elect him captain and serve him to their last breath.
Interspersed with Fr. Christopher's account of his past are his comments on his ministry in the America of our time. This strand of the narrative exists essentially for Wolfe to grumble about contemporary mores, especially the state of the Roman Catholic Church. When Fr. Christopher speaks of the scandals of priests molestating children, Wolfe puts "children" in quotation marks, claiming that the victims are mostly teenage males, and the sex abuse would stop if they were simply encouraged to fight as lads in the 17th century were (from his reading, Wolfe had noticed that many pirates were younger than is usually depicted today). Also, he gets in a few digs at language modernizers (priests who say "people" instead of "men") and clergy who discourage the Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament ritual. Wolfe has often used Christian themes and symbolism in his books, but here his repeated mention of the Roman Catholic Church specifically is likely to turn a lot of readers off.
Finally, Pirate Freedom shares problems common to all of Wolfe's work since the 1990s. The prose is written at a grade-school level. In his early masterpieces (The Fifth Head of Cerberus, The Book of the New Sun), Wolfe wrote some of the most intricate and crafted prose in English, equal to Proust or Nabokov. but this book reads like a self-published effort by someone who has never written anything before. Wolfe wants to hint that Christopher's father has a mafia background, and he does this, inconsistently and in just a few spots in the narrative, by sprinkling Christopher's dialogue with Hollywood mafia stereotypes: "Hey, you goomba!", "Capeesh?", "Wiseguy". Also, there is a feeling that Wolfe can't fully concentrate on fleshing out the narrative, with many events simply skipped over and summarized later in a couple of lines. Wolfe was well into his 70s when writing this, and unfortunately it shows.
While young adult readers may find Pirate Freedom entertaining, anyone who has followed Wolfe's career is likely to be disappointed. When critics call Wolfe being one of the greatest writers alive, they are really talking about books published decades before post-millennial stinkers like this one.
This is my first Wolfe novel, after some considerable hype, and I'm more than a little disappointed. The slowly revealed complications of plot are not interesting enough to make up for the bland uninspired characters and plodding limp narration. And even though I expect a lot of overt manliness in a book with such a title, the women in the story don't have much agency besides positioning themselves to bed the main character. I could see this being a hit with poorly raised teenage boys, but as an adult--YAWN. Quit halfway through. Probably won't read another by this author. Hard pass.
