Category: Books

This entry brought to you with­out hyphens and a dis­tinct short­age of com­mas.

Free Live Free by Gene Wolfe is a book by Gene Wolfe in a con­tin­u­ing series of books by Gene Wolfe that I have been read­ing a lot of Gene Wolfe late­ly, haven’t I? I’m now read­ing a col­lec­tion of short sto­ries by Gene Wolfe called The Island of Doc­tor Death and Oth­er Sto­ries and Oth­er Sto­ries.

Free Live Free takes place in what was at the time of pub­li­ca­tion con­tem­po­rary Chica­go. Four down on their luck sol­diers of for­tune take up an adver­tise­ment on its offer, free liv­ing space. The sol­diers of for­tune include an extreme­ly short and near­sight­ed unli­censed detec­tive, a door to door joke sales­man, a fat pros­ti­tute and Madame Ser­penti­na. This book pro­ceeds as a com­e­dy of errors until the last ten pages or so when in typ­i­cal Gene Wolfe fash­ion all the tum­blers final­ly fall into place and a lit­tle door opens shed­ding bright light all over the place and mak­ing you squint your eyes a lit­tle bit because the light is so bright it hurts a lit­tle since you’ve been wan­der­ing around in the dark for so long that you for­got you were in the dark.

Ben Free’s house is con­demned and the four ten­ants are enlist­ed to help defend it. They do a pret­ty good job for a cou­ple of hours, but end up boot to back­side and home­less. They sneak their way into a hotel and decide that the now dis­ap­pa­rat­ed Ben Free had dropped enough hints to indi­cate that he had some sort of trea­sure hid­den in the house. The ten­ants bick­er and bitch and even­tu­al­ly decide to go in togeth­er find the trea­sure and split it.

At this point the sto­ry inten­tion­al­ly frays into its com­po­nent parts and you won­der what the hell hap­pened to the plot. At one point all the threads come back togeth­er in an illu­sion of cohe­sion. Hilar­i­ous­ly, all of the main char­ac­ters and var­i­ous sup­port­ing char­ac­ters end up com­mit­ted to Bel­mont Asy­lum when all they tried to do was go vis­it some­one there. That part goes on for a while, but is so tongue in cheek and absurd that it does­n’t get old. Each per­son they run in to psy­cho­an­a­lyzes them and finds them irrepara­bly insane even though they aren’t. Need­less to say they end up tak­ing over the asy­lum and then escape. Every­thing frays apart again and they each pur­sue their own par­tic­u­lar heart’s desire. They get them, and find out that their heart’s are lack­ing.

I won’t spoil the end­ing.

Link of the day: For all my veg­e­tar­i­an friends and fam­i­ly: Veg­e­tar­i­an Beer List.