Latro in the Mist [Paperback]

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.

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.