Free Live Free - Gene Wolfe ***

Technically, this 1985 Gene Wolfe novel could be classed as science fiction, but the reality is far closer to fantasy. I particularly love the cover image from my UK edition, because it's the worst example of a cover artist not knowing anything about the book I've ever seen. It portrays a hi-tech future city complete with a spaceship, where the actual novel is set in a seedy, run-down US city with a 1970s feel - and even when surprising technology does arrive, it's decades old.

It feels like Wolfe is still finding his feet with real-world fantasy, and the book has a number of flaws, but it's still interesting. Four individuals down on their luck end up staying for a few nights free at the condemned house of Ben Free. The majority of the book simply features these four going about their lives, often in near-farce. This is particularly the case in a section involving a mental hospital where the staff assume everyone they meet is mentally ill.

The two female characters - self-styled witch Madame Serpentina and part-time hooker Candy Garth - are the more interesting. The men, failed salesman Osgood Barnes and unregistered private eye Jim Stubb (I could never remember which was which by name) are fairly forgettable - which I suppose is reflecting their position in life, but doesn't help the reader keep on top of the way over-long and meandering plot which is, to say the least, episodic.

We've known for a while there's something not quite of this world about Ben Free and in the last few chapters everything is explained (but doesn't quite make sense). This part, by contrast with the rest, is really rushed, to the extent it is pretty well impossible to follow the logic of how it comes to a sort of happy ending. To be frank, I got bored in places with the majority of the book, then confused at the end.

This may make it sounds like a disaster - and it's certainly not one of Wolfe's great novels. But to a Wolfe fan it's an essential because this is arguably the experimental lab that resulted in There are Doors. There are similarities between the novels - both feature, for instance, a mental institution and have a sudden, drastic turnabout at the end. It just doesn't quite work here. An oddity, but an important one in that progress.

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