Free Live Free

The standalone 1984 Gene Wolfe novel Free Live Free is set in a contemporary American city, and it plays its science-fictional cards very close to the chest for more than four-fifths of its total length. Written after the magisterial Book of the New Sun, it is similarly coy about its crucial speculative underpinnings, to the point where the Tor Books edition of 1985 appended a short explanatory chronology demanded by the editors. Unlike the nearly solipsistic first-person focus of the Book of the New Sun, Free Live Free centers on a set of four characters, each richly detailed, who are made interdependent by circumstance.

Nearly all readers seem to have appreciated the grittiness and empathy of the storytelling, and in these respects I show more was more than a little reminded of some of the best work of Theodore Sturgeon, who featured as a blurber on the jacket of my copy. The plot and pacing received a more mixed reception. The neo-noir features of the book perhaps led readers to expect a more conventional dramatic arc, but I suspect that Wolfe's designs for this book were determined by other considerations.

Reviewers and even the cover copy of the current edition have all said that the story is set in Chicago, but I haven't been able to figure out why. Perhaps it is because Wolfe himself lived in the Chicago area? The city is unnamed in the book. The pivotal address of 808 S. 38th Street is impossible for that city (whose numbered streets run east-west), and while the urban texture is credibly Chicagoan, no distinctive Chicago features (e.g. the Loop, lakefront, or O'Hare) are ever specified. When one character makes an excursion to the suburbs, I was sure that Wolfe modeled the location on his own Barrington neighborhood, but that didn't mean that he intended it to be there. He makes reference to other specific cities--Buffalo and Kansas City, to name two--but I think that the city where the story transpires is significantly undetermined.

The nebulousness of place helps mark out the book as an allegory. Overweight whore Candy Garth is the appetitive dimension of humanity, novelty salesman Osgood Barnes our affectional dimension, the snoop Jim Stubb our intellectual dimension, and the witch Madame Serpentina our spiritual dimension. But these characters are each so vividly drawn that they never seem like mere symbols. Considering them in this way can provoke a re-evaluation of the "gizmo" and its function in the final resolution of the story. As with other books by Wolfe, there is much to enjoy in the atomic level of its episodes and much to ponder in its larger frame and continuity. show less

Four misfits answer an ad from an old man, living free in his home in exchange for helping him to resist its demolition. They fail, the old man disappears, and we have a series of mad adventures as each of the four must face up to his or her shortcomings and desires. As they search for the old man, they realize that someone is also searching for them. Their adventures take them from a swank hotel to an insane asylum. References to Baum's Oz books, childhood favorites of Wolfe's, abound. Is this a retelling of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz? Or is it just another garden-variety roman noir about detectives, witches, and time travel?

Wolfe indulges in more humor here than in his longer--and justly more famous--works. This one is more similar show more to Castleview or, particularly, Pandora by Holly Hollander, than to his multi-volume science fiction novels. Cleverness abounds, in word choices, characters' names, and settings. Difficult to classify but a good bit of fun. show less

A commonality that I've noticed in lesser Wolfe books is serious pacing problems, where little seems to happen for many pages, where inconsequential dialogue extends far beyond its needed length, and then where a rush of things is jammed into the final few pages of a section or of the book. For its first fifty pages or so Free Live Free dodges this problem, introducing us to our main characters and their situation as down-on-their-luck Chicagoans, and then having things actually happen. It's great! If you've read any Wolfe before, you know the man can write- in the beginning pages of Free Live Free he shows that he can write about poverty and the struggle for daily survival to rival Steinbeck or Hemingway. Stubbs scrounging food, Barnes show more attempting to keep his dignity despite his lack of money, Candy and her career as an overweight prostitute, I could read a whole book that was just about their struggle to make it through a Chicago winter together in an old boarding house (though Madame Serpentina wouldn't exactly fit in a book like that). But this is Wolfe, of course, so the story doesn't stay so simple.

After the characters have put up a valiant effort but failed to save Ben Free's boarding house (which I would consider the end to the introduction of the story), the book falls smack into the pacing problem I mentioned above. For long swaths of pages we have dialogue in hotel rooms about food, pulp magazine article interviews, and various other minor intrigues. There's seventy-five pages on the protagonists visiting/getting trapped in/escaping a mental hospital, then another thirty on them navigating a Chicago blackout, with new characters introduced every few pages. We get to know the main quadrumvirate of characters very well, but the rest are bare sketches. Much of the "action," what little there is, seems inconsequential. There are extended segments of Stubbs delivering middling Sherlock Holmes detective exposition and explanation, a feature that also dragged down early volumes of The Book of the Long Sun (making that work inferior to the works in the series that it was sandwiched between). Once we get to the resolution, it's pretty out of left field, not very satisfying, and delivered in jumbled dialogue and crammed into the final twenty pages of the book.

Wolfe is one of my favorite writers. Unlike a lot of the top-tier science fiction writers, he's doesn't rely on his ideas to mask an inability to write, as he can craft stunning prose. He's not just a one-hit-wonder, either: though not many reach it, The Book of the Short Sun is phenomenal, a rival to The Book of the New Sun. Peace and The Fifth Head of Cerberus are also great, and The Wizard Night is a fun take on fantasy. Even what I would consider some of his lesser works are interesting, like Pandora By Holly Hollander and how it tells you a mystery without giving you the real solution. Wolfe is also a frustrating writer. Many of his books never rise above mediocrity- the only thing I can remember about Castleview is that it featured a cat named G. Gordon Kitty. He writes books that are filled with riddles, even when the book might be better without them. He's been on a streak lately of unimpressive books. I'll keep reading him as long as he keeps writing, but I expect I've already read (and he's already written) his best. Free Live Free is a lesser work of Gene Wolfe, if you're an adherent of his like I am then you'll probably read it regardless of what I say here. If you aren't, you should skip it and read the books I highlighted earlier in this paragraph. show less

As always, I loved the writing between all the dialogue. There are some very imaginative set pieces. The four main protagonists were living charicatures, but believable and filled with human flaws and hopes. On the other hand, Wolfe's conversations could be frustrating and hard to follow. You

I will say that the ending was not disappointing at all as other reviews have said; it actually resonates quite a bit with some of the concepts in Book/Urth of the New Sun.

That being said, I know this book will be more fulfilling on a reread, so hopefully I will find the energy sometime to do a closer reading of it.

Mostly just a decent noir/detective/heist novel. At the end, the MacGuffin suddenly decides to pretend that it was a urban-fantasy/sci-fi novel all along. WIUWT?! Wolfe seems to like barely genre stories, which is not the same as either crossover or magical realism. It's disconcerting, but at least I like noir/detective novels.

This was not my favorite of Wolfe's books. While it worked well as a noir/detective story, its sudden lurch towards sci-fi made for a muddled ending. I wouldn't warn anyone against it, but there are much better novels out there by Gene Wolfe.

Not my kind of book really, a book that almost reads as urban fantasy but is really sf, although really by the end of it I didn't care what was the resolution and the why behind the book.

Several characters are living free in Ben Frees house. The house is scheduled for demolition and Ben Free goes missing during their search they find that there are secrets within secrets. Each person has their problems and issues and they have to face up to their issues in order to find Ben and what his secrets are. Amusingly there are also mentions of Dion Fortune and Alaistair Crowley.