In a minute I’m going to tell about pirates, but there is not any real difference between pirates and wiseguys. One is at sea and the other is in cities. A big part of it is money, and money is just another way of saying freedom. If you have money, you can do pretty much whatever you want to do. (If you do not believe me, look at the people that have it.)
- Title: Pirate Freedom
- Author: Gene Wolfe
- Genre: Historical/Science Fiction
- Year: 2007
Fans of Gene Wolfe know what to expect when they read a new book or short story of his — unreliable narrators, Christian symbolism, elegantly ambiguous and multi-layered stories that reward the attentive reader, and, quite often as not, real adventure. Though it’s the riddles and and mysterious of identity and representation in his work that justly warrant the most attention and devotion from his readers, it is often overlooked that in many books Wolfe achieves narrative and thematic depth while at the same time delivering a gripping and imaginative adventure story — a combination seen in his New Sun, Long Sun, and Short Sun series, The Wizard-Knight duology, the Latro trilogy, and in 2007’s Pirate Freedom. Such adventure often serves to beguile the reader into falling in line with one interpretation of events, when reality may well be another — just part of the tricks and charms of this master storyteller.
For me, Wolfe’s writing has an ineffable quality I can best describe as ‘intriguing;’ in nearly every story of his I always get the sense that there is more left carefully unsaid, most often in the case of one of his famously unreliable narrators who leave out details the careful reader must discover themselves. Pirate Freedom is another first person account, one that’s narrator is perhaps Wolfe’s most seemingly honest — his apparent honesty serving as a startling hook into his story.
For, you see, Father Chris is a priest who was once a pirate captain. A priest living now, in modern times, who once commanded a crew of killers and thieves on the 17th century Spanish Main. Pirate Freedom is his story, and it is also his confession, and immediately it begins with him describing for us an event that he related to a parishioner who came to him for solace. Chris tells of a man who ‘insulted him in a way that would do harm,’ but who fought at his side in the same engagement. When it was over, Chris shook hands with the man before braining him with a handspike. Then he beat the man to death as he lay there on the deck of the ship they has just captured.
Thus we know that this priest is a murderer on page one, and either a time-traveler or a mad man. Needing to tell his whole story, needing to explain how these things could possibly be, Chris relates his childhood experiences, moving from America to a post-Communist Cuba with his father (who is probably, as Chris would say, a wiseguy), receiving his education in a monastery where he learned the languages and mathematics that would later prove very useful to him. While there, cut off from the world, things change subtly — mass is said in Latin, children fidget less and they no longer wear wristwatches. But Chris isn’t happy there, isn’t content to go from his childhood in the Monastery to an adulthood as a priest. He wants to see the world, to live a little.
The world he emerges into as he bids the monastery good-bye is a radically different one, one of horse drawn carts, sailing ships, and a fortified village where modern Havana should be. He is back in time, and doesn’t lose a lot of sleep over the how and why of it (and neither does Wolfe, nor should the reader) — for Chris has lucked into every boy’s dream of adventure, of freedom.
Except it isn’t, and Chris soon encounters the harsh realities of life as a child without family in such a place and time. But he adapts rapidly, finding a berth on a Spanish merchant ship and learning the skills of wind and sail. He travels the Caribbean, and voyages to Spain, and falls in love, and, finally, is taken captive by a pirate captain of his previous acquaintance.
Captain Bram Burt is an English privateer and patriot, and he takes ‘fellow Englishman’ Chris under his wing. But Chris is reluctant to be a pirate, not wanting to be a thief and murderer, as he did not simply throw away his Catholic upbringing as soon as he left the monastery. Wolfe’s refusal to seek any easy way out or skirt the moral realities of this time give this story a particular moral resonance as Chris, not merely the product of a theological education but of out modern sensibilities, seeks to justify his actions. The contrast with the world of the 17th century — and the piratical and colonial fringes of that world at that — isn’t glossed over as Chris must deal with the realities of slavery, violence, and robbery in a realistic way.
Chris is reluctant to be dragged into this world, despite excelling at his first prize command (a captured slave ship), and he refuses Burt’s offer to serve as one of his captains. Burt takes pity on him, and drops him off in Hispaniola, where Chris falls in with Frenchmen hunting the wild cattle there and becomes a buccaneer. But the buccaneers are driven from that place by the Spanish, and they steal a Spanish warship and raise the black flag and soon Chris finds himself right back in the position he refused the first time — only this time embracing it fully.
More adventure follows, as do further glimpses into the contemporary life of Father Chris, soon-to-be parish priest and youth counselor — a contemporary life that raises yet more questions of the timeline of the book’s events. And questions of character identity are, of course (this being Wolfe), also present — though not nearly to the extent of many of Wolfe’s more challenging stories. But Pirate Freedom remains primarily a historical adventure, though one with a compelling moral compass and a Wolfian flare for raising questions.
And make no mistake, this is satisfying purely as a historical novel. Like the Latro series, Pirate Freedom is an excellently realized portrait of its time and place. Wolfe’s engineer’s mind is in evidence in the concrete details of life on and off a vessel in the Age of Sail, and I found the nautical lexicon of sails and rigs and hulls and masts and all the rest more accessible and easily understood than other novels exploring this period. Perhaps because Wolfe’s narrator is himself explaining these things to an audience as once as ignorant as he was, or perhaps because Wolfe just knows his stuff and is that good of a writer, but I found every glimpse of material life in this novel completely and fascinatingly authentic. Pirate Freedom is one of Wolfe’s most accessible books, perhaps alongside another historical novel of his, The Devil in a Forest, and certainly one that could best serve as an introduction to his work for fans of historical adventure.
But it isn’t until the very end of the novel that we really discover the implications of what we are reading, when what Father Chris is planing becomes apparent. Without ruining the twist, I’ll just say that it raises anew every issue of confession and redemption swimming around in the rough seas of Pirate Freedom — and about the our own willingness to excuse the inexcusable.
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