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. ( )

Time travel story.

Wolfe's usual enigmas.

Devout pirate-priest.

"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. ( )

From Publishers Weekly
Fantasist extraordinaire Wolfe (The Wizard) dabbles in time travel paradoxes for this charming tale of a monastic novice in postcommunist Cuba. As the years pass, Christopher, the son of an American crime lord, gradually loses touch with his family and decides against taking holy orders. He leaves the monastery and finds himself in the 18th century. This unexplained time slip, along with Chris's equally mysterious jump to the late 20th century, are the only fantastic elements in what's otherwise a fairly straightforward tale of derring-do on the high seas. Wolfe describes his plucky young hero's rise from much abused common seaman to successful pirate captain, filling his story with duels, treachery, ship-to-ship combat and an abundance of accurate period detail, avoiding both the larger than life romanticism and the fantastical elements often associated with such pirate tales. Captain Chris is a laconic and rather unemotional narrator, which may put off some readers, but Wolfe's elegant prose still makes this relatively minor effort worth reading.

This was mildly absorbing. ( )

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. ( )