Gene Wolfe (1931–2019)

Excellent novel but a challenging read. One of the most challenging works I have ever read outside of my academic position. When is this taking place? Where is this taking place? Who is the narrator? Does the narrator know who and when they are? But the read is well worth the challenge. It is satisfying that it is touching back to the beginning with references and scenes linked to The Book of the New Sun. But still so many questions remain to be answered in the last volume of the 12 volume Solar Cycle. Let’s see if Wolfe answers any of them in the final volume, Return to the Whorl. I’m up for the challenge.… (meer)

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 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.… (meer)