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Title: Latro in the Mist by Gene Wolfe ISBN: 0-7653-0294-2 Publisher: Orb Books Pub. Date: 01 January, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (4 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Wolfe, switching gears
Comment: "Soldier in the Mist" and "Soldier of Arete" feel like an exercise, Wolfe consciously attempting to develop a storyline where the protagonist and setting are as contrary to the "Book of the New Sun" as possible. Here, Latro suffers from daily memory loss, where Severian captures everything, even if he is unaware of it. Latro travels in the dawning world of our distant past, where Man is not yet master of the world; Severian proceeds on a shriveled Urth where Man's great accomplishments are long spoiled and forgotten. The link is Wolfe at his best, weaving his rich, layered, veiled and often startling prose in first-person perspective.
Wolfe's imagination is so rich, and his narrative skills so great that you wonder whether these books can actually be memoirs as they are presented. If you marveled at the "Book of the New Sun", you will enjoy Wolfe effort at switching gears so completely. Latro's terse commentary may also be a welcome change from Severian's verbosity, but there are no creatures as wonderful as Dorcas here. Whether the "Soldier" books end-up as more than just an exercise to Exorcize "Book of the New Sun" really depends; Wolfe owes us two more books before we can make a full comparison.
Rating: 2
Summary: Interesting idea results in one of Wolfe's lesser works
Comment: LATRO IN THE MIST collects Gene Wolfe's two novels SOLDIER OF THE MIST and SOLDIER OF ARETE, which chronicle the experiences of Latro, a Roman mercenary formerly fighting for the Persians against the Greeks. Wounded in a battle outside the temple of Demeter, Latro is cursed by the Godess to perpetually forget his experiences everyday. His only means of retaining some memory of his life is to write daily in his scroll, and therefore the narrative is first-person. As a curious recompense, Latro gains the ability to see the Olympian gods at work in the world, and forms a bridge between the Greeks and their understanding of the divine world.
SOLDIER OF THE MIST begins with Latro's awakening after the battle and discovery of his new forgetfulness. A defeated mercenary of the enemy, he is made a slave and frequently shifted from owner to owner. The book climaxes one of the last battles of the Persian Wars, and hints at the coming Peloponnesian Wars. In SOLDIER OF ARETE, Latro is part of a team searching for a Persian engineer who disappeared into the wilderness, and the novel ends with a cliffhanger in which Latro cleverly gains his freedom. Wolfe has stated that he is at work on a third novel.
I thought the series quite disappointing because there is little direction. Instead, these two novels chronicle aimless meanderings. In Wolfe's masterpiece The Book of the New Sun, Severian's ultimate fate was to become the New Sun and save Urth, and The Book of the Long Sun led to the deliverance of the Whorl's inhabitants. In Latro's chronicles, on the other hand, there is no specific goal, and Wolfe basically uses Latro to explore Greece of 2,500 years ago and it's culture which is unusual to modern people. This is less fascinating then it sounds; I'm a classics major concentrating in Greek and I found the narrative lackluster.
LATRO IN THE MIST suffers from the common problem of historical fiction - trying to fit the protagonist into too many major events. It feels more that Wolfe created Latro to show off history instead of developing a solid protagonist and working from there. Similarly, because Latro can see the gods, it occasionally seems like Wolfe brings in each god or godess in order to have them all included somewhere instead of using this plot device only when absolutely necessary.
And one further problem is that in SOLDIER OF ARETE the plot moves in one point much too slowly. A confusing scene in which Latro finds himself in Thrace drags on for what seems even longer than the infamous tunnels subplot of The Book of the Long Sun. This ruined my enjoyment of the book, as I've never felt any of Wolfe's other works to be a chore.
In you've never read Wolfe's acclaimed and genuinely stunning writing, I'd recommend starting with The Book of the New Sun. LATRO IN THE MIST sprung from an interesting concept - to chart the lives of the Greeks and their ancient society - but the implementation is unsatisfying and the series so far ranks among Wolfe's lesser works.
Rating: 5
Summary: Two of Wolfe's greatest novels in one lovely package
Comment: Having haunted used bookstores and libraries for a year or two for copies of SOLDIER IN THE MIST and SOLDIER OF ARETE, my zeal to buy this book the very day it came out was perhaps excessive but, I think, understandable.
I've been a fan of Wolfe's since the fateful summer of 2000, when I first cracked open a copy of his magnum opus, THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN, and through the course of sixteen wildly different novels and innumerable short stories he has only rarely disappointed me. That said, the Latro books have immediately jumped, if not to the head of the pack, right to the top two or three.
The main character, Latro, is a mercenary formerly in the employ of the Persian emperor Xerxes during his ill-fated invasion of Greece in 479 BCE. Struck on the head outside the goddess Demeter's temple, Latro loses his short-term memory; like the main character in "Memento", even his recent past is a mystery to him, although Latro's window of memory is twelve hours long rather than five minutes. Captured by the Greeks, he becomes a slave, passed from one master to another and one quest to another in a series of picaresque adventures ranging from the comic to the heroic to the almost unutterably grim. The word "Latro" means both "soldier" and "pawn", and Latro, despite his native cunning and skill at arms, is a pawn indeed, used by gods, men, and monsters to further their own aims; his only saving graces are his innate stoic nobility and the diverse collection of friends he accumulates along the way.
Wolfe deploys his usual stunning array of literary devices and tricks, from the de rigueur unreliable first person narrative to the more subtle possibilities allowed by Latro's illness. Several characters disappear, only to reappear in later chapters with new names and, occasionally, new faces - strangers to Latro, but not to the eagle-eyed reader, who can use the clues scattered throughout the text to discern the wheels within wheels that Wolfe has arrayed to power the plot. The prose is, of course, peerless in its elegance, diction, and intelligence; we know that Wolfe, like a silver-tongued magician, is misdirecting us, but his patter is so charming that we don't care.
A few words about the setting: despite the fantastic elements that Wolfe uses in the book, LATRO IN THE MIST is a solid and powerful piece of historical fiction, and accomplishes what only the best books in that genre can aspire to: it puts us in the mindset of people who lived in that era, lets us see how they probably acted and reacted and thought and lived. We see that Latro's memory loss is merely a reflection or literalization of the times he lives in, where slow communication and inadequate recordkeeping could distort events of even recent history into myth, legend, and hearsay; and we see that the gods and supernatural beings that Latro contends with are also reflections of the times, when people saw divine agency in almost every occurence of their daily lives. Wolfe's depiction of the Greeks feels right, painting them neither as noble towers of intellect nor as superstitious cavemen, and his frank depiction of the ancient world's brutality makes us appreciate their greatest achievements (which, in the book, are still a few decades in coming) all the more.
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Title: The Knight (The Wizard Knight, Book 1) by Gene Wolfe ISBN: 0765309890 Publisher: Tor Books Pub. Date: 03 January, 2004 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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Title: Return to the Whorl : The Final Volume of 'The Book of the Short Sun' by Gene Wolfe ISBN: 0312873646 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: 06 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Castle of Days by Gene Wolfe ISBN: 0312890427 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: 15 March, 1995 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: In Green's Jungles (Book of the Short Sun, Book 2) by Gene Wolfe ISBN: 0312873638 Publisher: Tor Books Pub. Date: 04 May, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: On Blue's Waters : Volume One of 'The Book of the Short Sun' by Gene Wolfe ISBN: 0312872577 Publisher: Tor Books Pub. Date: 02 September, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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