Tor, 2007, $24.95
reviewed in Interzone 213, December 2007
The first thing you do when reading a book by Gene Wolfe is take note of who is telling the story. Remember, Wolfe’s narrator, even the omniscient third person, is rarely a truth teller, though they are always presented as if we could have no alternative but to trust them. Because Severian remembers everything, it does not mean that he tells everything. So, in Pirate Freedom we are in the hands of Father Chris, a Catholic priest in contemporary America who is confessing to murder, theft and sex. Now what could be more honest than that? Except that as the book goes on we have more and more reason to feel uncertain about what we are being told.
Let’s start with the character’s name: Father Chris or, in another life, Captain Chris. We never learn the full name, except that he tells us that others find it difficult to pronounce. Yet there is not this difficulty with any of the other characters, who come from a host of cultures, including English, Spanish, French, Carib, Amerindian and African. What’s more, when we are, just once, given a phonetic pronunciation of his name, it comes out as something other than Chris.
So our guide through this swashbuckling tale is a mystery, and actually what happens is a mystery too. Chris frequently resorts to elisions of various sorts: ‘and so on,’ he says regularly, or even, more blatantly, if I told you everything that happened it would take more time than I have. The story is littered with gaps that we are left to fill as best we can.
Even the most fundamental part of the story is missing. We start at some point in the near future when Cuba is no longer communist. Chris’s father is a New Jersey casino operator (and, we presume, gangster) who goes to Havana to open a new casino, and puts the young Chris in a Catholic school attached to a monastery. Then something outside the monastery changes, we never know what or why or how, and when Chris, as a young man, chooses to go out into the world, he finds himself in the middle of the 17th century. For want of anything better to do, he becomes a seaman, then his ship is taken by pirates, and suddenly he becomes a pirate captain himself. (Remember, another common element in Wolfe’s books is that his characters rarely take a position, rather they are imagined into them by the other characters – think Operation Ares and The Book of the New Sun and Free Live Free and, well, you get the picture – so Chris is seen by his fellows as a pirate captain, and so becomes one.) Naturally, he proves to be a superb seaman, a brilliant tactician, a great pirate.
From here on, the novel is filled with all the colour and action of an old romantic pirate story. Women disguise themselves as men in order to become sailors and follow their love; there are castaways and sea battles and chases and buried treasure with secret maps. It’s nothing like the stories, Chris tells us, as he provides some gritty everyday detail, but in its broad sweep this is exactly like all the stories And though he never gives details – ‘and so on’ – Chris is clearly the archetypal romantic hero, since every woman he meets is in love with him, and he wins every hand to hand fight. Then something happens, Chris is swept through time once more, into a twenty-first century earlier than the time he left. And there he becomes a priest in modern America, but with one eye on the situation in Cuba, so that when Castro falls he might go back and somehow be reunited with the woman he left in the 17th century.
This is, to all appearances, a stand-alone novel, but there are enough gaps and hesitations that I wouldn’t be at all surprised if a companion volume appeared at some time. If you want a riproaring pirate adventure, this is for you, but read it carefully because there is a lot more going unsaid within this book.