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A review by subplotkudzu
Pirate Freedom by Gene Wolfe
3.0
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....