Free Live Free [Hardcover]

Wolfe's fans probably admire most the books in which he demonstrates his ability to create believable (and yet unbelievably complex) fictional settings. In this novel, Wolfe has placed the strange events of his plotline right in the middle of a run-down and rather seedy neighborhood in Chicago, with forays into a nearby luxury hotel and an insane asylum. It's remarkable how well this works. Wolfe demonstrates that he's just as good at listening to how people actually talk to each other in the real world as he is at imagining how they would talk in particularly baroque and distant futures. The conversations between the many characters who make up this book are its biggest pleasure. It's pointless, however, to attempt to explain why the conversations leave such a lasting impression in the mind, because the dialogue derives its effectiveness from the way that it reveals the psyches of some extremely well-drawn characters. If you don't know the characters, you can't understand the appeal. A part of it is that the main characters are all, in one way or another, the type of people that our culture regards as losers. Wolfe manages to make you root for them, but not by idealizing them. Instead, he shows you all of their many flaws...and pretty serious flaws they are, from an ethical viewpoint. Then he shows you their small virtues and talents. And then you begin to realize how hard they have to struggle, because of their poverty, just to get through life. This is a remarkable science-fiction novel for a lot of reasons, but mainly for being populated with protagonists who are neither fearless heroes nor nihilistic violent cretins.

You will see elsewhere on this page a few words which mention the characters and plot of this remarkable book. They are but shadows casting shadows... how can a spattering of words capture the magic of the work as a whole? You simply have to read the book itself to discover the intricate art of it, the unexpected and delightful revalations that make you laugh and weep.

My first exposure to Gene Wolfe was through his Book of the New Sun (consisting of four books, with a few related titles - it was a pleasure to read them all.) The Book of the New Sun impressed me enough to count Gene Wolfe as one of my favourite authors. Free Live Free has pushed the man into a seemingly unassailable first place position. If another author ever manages to displace him, I fear I may perish from sheer joy of reading.

Gene Wolfe's novel FREE LIVE FREE is a fantastical tale set in an American downtown (hinted to be Chicago) in the early 1980s. The mysterious old man Benjamin Free finds that his home is scheduled to be demolished to build a highway overpass. Seeking to put off the demolition by keeping the house permanently occupied, he places a classified ad inviting people to live there for free. Who would answer such an ad? Losers such as the traveling salesman Ozzie Barnes, the overweight hooker Candy Garth, the out-of-work private investigator Jim Stubb, and the Gypsy occultist Madame Serpentina. When Free goes missing, these four decide to find him, and soon find themselves wrapped up in a conspiracy greater than they can imagine, pursued by government agents.

Before the science fiction basis of the plot is revealed near the end, the characters proceed Keystone Kops-like through a serious of zany episodes. Wolfe loves to construct his books as puzzles, and quite often meaning of one scene is only revealed in a following one, or when the same scene is told again from another character's perspective. No doubt many readers will find this a frustrating cock and bull story for most of its length, but it holds interest due to the details with which Wolfe endows the lives of his four protagonists, especially the techniques of desperate salesmen and the tribulations of prostitution. The plot does start to pick up in the last 50 pages, and I don't regret reading the novel to the end.

But the great downside of FREE LIVE FREE, which makes it something of a disappointment in Wolfe's output up to this time, is that it is written in exceedingly pedestrian prose. In his works of the 1970s (The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Peace, "Seven American Nights" and THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN), Wolfe was a master of prose style, with his narrators lapsing into Proustian reverie that made for a number of quotable moments. Here he has focused so much on the characterization and plot that he has forgoten to write prose that truly moves us. Sadly, this trend continued through his other novels of the 1980s and most of his work since.