Gene Wolfe is widely known as the speculative genre’s high-brow alibi. Not even its most stubborn critics can find much to fault him with, and that’s why he’ll probably go down in history as one of his generations very finest authors. I’ve only read one book by him before (”The Wizard Knight”), but that’s of course due to my own stupidity and has absolutely nothing to do with Wolfe’s magnificence. So in a vain attempt to rectify this wrong and save myself from proverbial damnation, I decided to pick up his latest offering, “Pirate Freedom”.

This book is first and foremost about pirates, which is cool enough in and of itself, though not in the vein of Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean”. What you have here is a book that takes a very realistic approach to the trade, rather than the glorified vision most teenagers (like myself) conjure when confronted with the term.

Chris and his father moves from Jersey, USA to Havana, Cuba, where Chris is enrolled with a school at a local monastery. His father may not visit him while he’s there, nor may Chris depart from the premises until he takes his vows or leaves the cloth forever. He chooses the latter, and sets out as a young adult to find his father. But things have changed since he entered the monastery. Where the roads before were covered with asphalt, they’re now covered with regular gravel, and the cars that zoomed along them have been replaced with mules and carts. Chris has gone back in time to the era of conquest, colonies and pirates and he must now find a way to survive…

The entire book is written as a 312 page long confession. Old Chris has become a priest and is obviously back in the present time. When a man confesses to him that he has killed a man, Chris tells him that he’s done the same. The man wishes to know more about how a pious man like Father Chris could have done such a thing, but Chris says that the answer to that question would be much too long and complicated for a single evening, but he will write it all down and mail him his confession when he’s done.

Wolfe makes expertly use of the first-person narrative in “Pirate Freedom”, and the jumps between the main character’s life as a pirate and a priest are seamless and easy to tell apart. You do get the pleasure of reading a lot of info-dumps about pirate lifestyle and ships, though they’re never boring due to the fact that Wolfe draws comparisons between todays myths and “how it really was”.

For such a short book there’s a surprising high content of action, and while he does often hint at what is to come, the plot manages to surprise and entertain. The ending is also very satisfying, though we never do get an explanation for Chris’ time-traveling abilities…

“Pirate Freedom” is very similar to Wolfe’s acclaimed omnibus “The Wizard Knight”, both in style and tone. “The Wizard Knight” is in my opinion a much better book, mostly due to the fact that the only good character in this one is the Chris himself, where as tWK had dozens upon dozens of them. There are of course other characters than Chris, but they didn’t get enough screen time to become much more than fleeting acquaintances.

All in all I’d say that “Pirate Freedom” is a very good book, but falls surprisingly short on areas that I would have bet my temporal lobe it wouldn’t. However, even if this isn’t Wolfe’s best book, it’s still much better than 90% of other fantasy books you might consider. It’s exciting, informative and it’s got a bittersweet ending that makes it all worth the while. I liked it a lot, and so would you if you gave it a chance.

8.0 /10