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    Pirate Freedom
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    Pirate Freedom
    Unavailable
    Pirate Freedom
    Ebook425 pages7 hours

    Pirate Freedom

    By Gene Wolfe

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    As a young parish priest, Father Christopher has heard many confessions, but his own tale is more astounding than any revelation he has ever encountered in the confessional . . . for Chris was once a pirate captain, hundreds of years before his birth.

    Fresh from the monastery, the former novice finds himself inexplicably transported back to the Golden Age of Piracy, where an unexpected new life awaits him. At first, he resists joining the notorious Brethren of the Coast, but he soon embraces the life of a buccaneer, even as he succumbs to the seductive charms of a beautiful and enigmatic senorita. As the captain of his own swift ship, which may or may not be cursed, he plunders the West Indies in search of Spanish gold. From Tortuga to Port Royal, from the stormy waters of the Caribbean to steamy tropical jungles, Captain Chris finds danger, passion, adventure, and treachery as he hoists the black flag and sets sail for the Spanish mainland.

    Where he will finally come to port only God knows . . . .

    Pirate Freedom is a captivating new masterpiece by the award-winning author of The Wizard Knight and Soldier of Sidon.


    At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateNov 13, 2007
    ISBN9781429925228
    Unavailable
    Pirate Freedom
    Author

    Gene Wolfe

    Gene Wolfe (1931-2019) was the Nebula Award-winning author of The Book of the New Sun tetralogy in the Solar Cycle, as well as the World Fantasy Award winners The Shadow of the Torturer and Soldier of Sidon. He was also a prolific writer of distinguished short fiction, which has been collected in such award-winning volumes as Storeys from the Old Hotel and The Best of Gene Wolfe. A recipient of the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, the Edward E. Smith Memorial Award, and six Locus Awards, among many other honors, Wolfe was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2007, and named Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2012.

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    Reviews for Pirate Freedom

    3.5/5

    8 ratings7 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Fun to jump back into Gene Wolfe, even if part of his plot (published 2007) mimics my manuscript from 2004. I won't hold it against him.
    • 4/5
      An interesting take on the pirate novel from Gene Wolfe. As other reviewers have mentioned, he recycles the narrative device from the Wizard-Knight in which the narrator recounts, in a conversational letter, events that occured after he was mysteriously transported to another time/place. In this case, the narrator is transported into the early 18th century Carribean, an era when Spain was the dominant sea power, and her ships plied the Atlantic bringing gold and other treasure from the New World. After signing on as a seaman aboard a Spanish merchant ship returning to Spain from Cuba, he learns the basics of navigation and seamanship. Later, while re-crossing the Atlantic aboard the same ship, he and the rest of the crew are captured by pirates. Eventually, the narrator becomes a pirate captain himself. On the positive side, the novel is fast-paced, held my attention, and I was easily able to finish it in a few days. The main problem with the book is that Wolfe tries to cram too much action into the 300 pages, and thus much of it seems rather cursory. In particular, the climactic voyage around Cape Horn from the Atlantic to the Pacific is covered in just a few pages. Similarly the final battle with the double-crossing band of pirates is covered in little over a page. It almost seemed like the author was struggling to meet a deadline. The other problem with having so much action packed into so few pages is that there is no room for descriptive passages to make the reader feel they are actually there. When I read nautical fiction, I want to hear the thunder of the sails flapping in a 40 knot gale, and feel the sting of the salt spray as waves crash across the bow. There was none of that here. In fact, the Carribean seemed remarkably placid, in terms of weather, during the narrator's time as a pirate. Similarly there was almost no description of how the pirates looked, how they dressed, what they did in their spare time, etc. There was no room for character development, and so it was difficult to feel that these were real people. I guess this review sounds more critical than I initially intended. This is Gene Wolfe after all, and even bad Wolfe is better than 80% of what is out there.
    • 4/5
      Gene Wolf says to himself, "Self, I can write about pirates, properly researched and everything; why write anything else?"Coming from an author legendary for the subtlety of his works, this book is a suspiciously straightforward story about a man mysteriously transported to the past, in which he becomes a pirate and adventures ensue. Lots of fun, but a little awkward in the blocking occasionally.
    • 4/5
      I started reading Pirate Freedom the other day, and it’s very different from most books I’ve read. Despite this (or perhaps due to it), I find it both interesting and engaging. I’m not even half way through the book yet, but can’t wait to pick it back up.It’s about Chris, a priest, who somehow finds himself transported back in time from his monastery in Cuba to the heyday of pirates in the Caribbean ocean. Chris finds himself becoming a pirate, and tries to reconcile it with his faith he grew up with. It’s written backwards, as a memoir after he returns, although (so far) the method of transport through time is not explained. The book seems to have plenty of action and is excellently researched and written.I highly recommend it, even though I’m not even finished with it yet. I find myself wanting to read other books by Gene Wolfe, although this is the first I’ve read of his works.Since I wrote this, I've finished the book. Although the time travel is never explained, the book does have a happy ending. I'm intrigued by Wolfe now and will pursue other books by him. I would certainly recommend this book to anyone interested in pirates, time travel, or nautical-themed books.
    • 2/5
      "Pirate Freedom" was remarkably good; much like virtually everything Wolfe writes. Based on his past work Wolfe has set a staggeringly high bar for himself; I now expect anything written by him to be insightful, ingenious, surprising, delightfully cryptic, staggeringly well researched, and poetic to boot. "Pirate Freedom" didn't knock my socks off by these standards, but it still shines like a jewel in the muck. It leaves you with the same feeling you get when you put down the Arthur Miller you've been reading and pick up one by Shakespeare; the first is brilliant, but the second is unsurpassed. An only mildly surprising ending and a overly used conceit (time travel) only slightly detract here from a brilliant book about character, deductive reasoning, faith, God, moral choices and the astonishing moments all of our lives contain. "Pirate Freedom" made me think about divine judgement, human violence, and relations between the sexes in completely new and welcome ways. That's not something I would expect most books to do, but Wolfe is so consistently amazing that from him I now suspect nothing less.
    • 3/5
      Rambling story of Chris who was sent to a parish school in post communist Cuba, only to end up a pirate in the Caribbean far from the time he started out in. This story is very hard to get into but after trudging through more than half the book it gets interesting. The book is written as if it was a journal of a man making a confession so it tends to follow a stream of thought rambling nature, this can be very perturbing when good parts of the book are interrupted by moral commentary. If you are looking for sea action as in Patrick O'Brian books, you won’t find it; this book ends up being more of a love story than anything else.
    • 4/5
      Gene Wolfe's latest single-volume novel reflects his ongoing interests in time travel, subjectivity, morality, Catholicism, and other themes that he has explored before. In Pirate Freedom, a boy named Chris leaves a monastery school in twenty-first century Cuba and finds himself thrown back in time several centuries, to an age when pirates fought the Spanish navy for primacy in the Caribbean. We know little of Chris; he has a long, difficult-to-pronounce Italian last name, and we suspect his father is a Mafioso. Chris has somehow returned to our own time after his adventure, and has become a priest. He tells his story (another Wolfean first-person narrator, which raises the question of whether we can trust what he tells us) as a sort of confession, which he is delivering before he tries to return to the earlier age and the woman he loved there.When Chris first leaves the monastery, he does not realize that he is in a different time. As he experiences the new world, he realizes that something is different, and eventually he figures out that "the years no longer start with twenty as they should." He signs onto a merchant ship as a way of making a living, and experiences the cruelties of that life. When his ship is captured by pirates, he initially refuses to become a pirate, but eventually he does, and soon becomes a captain. As a pirate, Chris makes use of his mental quickness and polyglot capabilities. At times, when he hints at things he is about to tell us, he reminds us sharply of Silk, Horn, or Severian, protagonists of Wolfe's classic Sun novels. He struggles with the way pirates live and treat others; he points out to us that pirates treat one another on their ships much less violently than the captains of merchant ships treattheir crews. Wolfe explains about different types of ships and boats that were used duting that period, showing his usual interest in historical accuracy and his engineer's delight in how things work. During his pirate career, Chris falls in love with Novia, whom he keeps with him throughout the story. He joins forces with Captain Bram Burt, becoming one of several pirate ship captains in Burt's fleet and advising him on military and sailing matters. He experiences and relates moments of bliss while sailing, watching the moon set, visiting primitive islands. He hears the voice of God. He interrupts his story with accounts of his doings as a twentieth-century priest and his longing to return to his prior life. These interruptions occur more frequently as the novel progresses. Finally, out in a boat alone during a storm, he is capsized and rescued by a boat with a radio, signifying that he has returned to the time of his origin.As with any Wolfe novel, careful reading is called for, and things are not always made clear. Questions abound, such as, What is the significance of the title? How does Chris really square his "career" with his desire to love God, and his recognition of his own sinfulness? How and why do the transfers in time happen? and many more. I'm looking forward to a re-read.