[Edit: You might want to check out my blog post about Gene Wolfe's Wizard-Knight duology. I mention this book there, and got some good comments about this book and the others from another fan. http://vikingsbooksetc.wordpress.com/... ]

Actually finished this over a month ago, along with a few other books, but with illness and teaching and other things I just haven't been able to get things posted on goodreads lately. Not much time now, but I will say that this book feels very similar to the Wizard-Knight duology. It is very difficult not to conflate the perceived innocent naïveté of the narrator with the author- or rather, the book just feels "clean" and straightforward b/c it is so easy to perceive the narrator in that way. Never mind that he confesses to many things that a not exactly shining examples of virtue, though I will also say that we seem to be invited to learn, with the narrator, to tolerate the sins and failings of others through our acceptance of our own fallenness. The plot is... Hard to describe. Straightforward first person pirate story, except in this wonderful voice , again comparable to that of the Wizard Knight, and except for the twist at the end which may be a bit abrupt for some people (like the end of a Miyazaki film), but which is also, in retrospect, that which undergirds the entire narration and so "fits" despite the abruptness of the revelation. Well, hope I articulated that alright. Hard to do this in a hurry. Overall, feels simple on one level, but open to various levels of reading and rereading. This and Wizard Knight are so different from the other Wolfe books I've read- well, there are strong points of contact, but Fifth Head of Cerberus is certainly a little more daunting from start to finish, however complex the deeper levels of each of these works.

Original review below.


Got this book for my pirate loving little sister, and decided to buy a copy for myself too (I almost kept her present, actually). I won't guarantee everyone will like it, but I'm a fan of Gene Wolfe and really wanted to read this. I haven't read too much of his-- most of the Book of the New Sun, the Wizard Knight duology, Fifth Head of Cerberus, and some of his short fiction. Out of all these, I feel like Wizard Knight has most in common with Pirate Freedom-- both have a first person narrator with a very plain, naive-feeling voice (not sure naive is the best way to put it-- and in any case, it at times feels like a duplicitous plainness, though maybe that's me being suspicious b/c of what I've heard about Wolfe's writing), writing a letter to explain what has happened to them to someone else. Wolfe is known for using unreliable narrators-- in these books, that seems to manifest itself in how things are told and what is told, rather than any far reaching duplicity-- at least that's in my reading so far, and I do feel like I'm probably missing something (Fifth Head of Cerberus has a much more extreme bit of duplicity, where one narrator is apparently a shapechanger who believes he is the human whose shape he has taken). Certain things which would take up a lot of room as action-oriented scenes are glossed over in this book, and the narrator often insists that he can't remember certain bits, but other bits are very clear-- whether these count as "unreliable narration" I don't know, but they certainly bring the perspective of the narrator, with all its limitations and biases, to the forefront, rather than taking the idea of the narrator as a barely acknowledged conceit to justify our access to the story-- in other words, the narrator is understood as a real character in the frame narrative. That said, the story doesn't drown in a reflexive focus on the one telling the story, and, with Wizard Knight, this is the Gene Wolfe book I would most recommend to more casual or escapist sci-fi/fantasy readers. Well, you may not like it still-- I think "good" or "productive" books (or "transformative") tend to subvert our escapist tendencies to some degree (see CS Lewis' -Experiment in Criticism- for one take on this phenomenon)-- but still, I think most people will enjoy this, even if Wolfe's books tend to take multiple readings to drain every last drop out of them.

One note about the title-- early in the book the narrator equates Freedom with Money/Gold, so that the title might be interpreted "Pirate Gold"-- a much more standard, swashbuckling title. Considering Wolfe's reputation as a subtle and thoughtful writer, I'm inclined to take this as intentional. At the very least, "Pirate Freedom" is a bit of an odd title, and I'm assuming that the topic/problem of "freedom" will be very pertinent in understanding the book.

I've got to say, this book feels like a perfect one to teach in a Reading and Composition course-- it is a good length, it is fairly accessible, but there is a lot going on and it provides a great opportunity to discuss narratological levels (at the very least the distinction author/narrator/character) etc. I'm always stuck teaching Medieval lit, b/c, oddly enough, it seems easier for the students to figure out what the conditions for an adequate thesis are when they are exploring multiple texts within a relatively alien culture. But if I were to teach the A level again, with no research requirement, I would be tempted to teach a broader range of texts, including this one-- maybe with the overall topic of "Adventure Stories", which would let me cover some sagas, maybe Bernard Foye's Third Castling, and some things by Astrid Lindgren, to cover the Scandinavian side of things, plus some non-Scandi books like... Pirate Freedom. And others-- maybe Treasure Island, to give an earlier pirate story (and of course, any saga that has a lot of Vikings would technically be about Pirates too). The Hobbit would fit this category too.

[Note-- this last part below is a bit of an unfair rant, due to some issues I was dealing with in the Reading and Comp class I was teaching-- if someone doesn't like how a narratological conceit is executed, then they have a perfect right to dislike a book. Ah well.]

I'm looking over other people's reviews of this book-- it seems like the bad reviews are upset over the "writing", meaning, the voice of the narrator-- I think the point would be that the awkward way in which the narrator narrates, or represents himself, is PART of the story. The narrator has his own agenda, and it is because of THAT that all the women are the same character (one person calls the book misogynist)-- b/c for him, they ARE. In other words, it feels like the critiques of the writing are conflating "real author" with "narrator" and blaming Gene Wolfe for what his character says. And I have to admit, this is the sort of problem students have in my R&C courses a lot-- for some reason I just could NOT get some of my students to understand that they were supposed to write about the characters in the story as representations of people, not as REAL people-- you don't treat Beowulf on his own terms as a real person, dammit, you treat him as part of a text with an agenda of its own. One student even talked about Beowulf as the author of the poem. Blegh. >:[