SOLDIER OF THE MIST - GENE WOLFE

Wolfe truly is the puzzlemaster. If you’re not familiar, Wolfe wrote the greatest and most complicated Fantasy (here I’m including Sci-Fi as a subgenre of fantasy) epic of all time, the 12 volume Solar Cycle, which is so baroque, tightly plotted and full of insane detail and mindbenders that it’s hard to believe a single person wrote it, let alone the man who invented the machine that makes Pringles. Wolfe loves a diegetic manuscript, where the thing we are reading is created within the story we’re being told under specific conditions that we should consider when we’re trying to figure out what’s really going on. He also loves an insane twist on this technique. In BotNS, the concept is that Severian is writing the “novels” as they exist to us, and he also has a perfect memory (you have to figure out what he’s lying about). The wonderful novella Seven American Nights, features a text that is a journal that might have pages missing and that the author was drugged for part of (you have to guess what part he’s drugged for and what’s missing). This one is no different but the concept this time is that a man wakes up with no ability to form memories beyond a day, so he writes down everything he remembers on a papyrus and rereads it. This papyrus is the novel. Ideally, he’d read the whole thing and write new stuff down everyday, but life gets busy and there are large breaks where we have to guess what has happened in the gap, or listen to what another character says to Latro, the man writing. Latro spends the book trying to remember where he was from and thus get reunited with his formal life. That could have been enough, but this is Wolfe so Latro also has the ability to see the Gods and when he touches them, everyone else can see them too. Actually, not even that is enough, Latro is a not Greek, we come to guess that he’s actually from Rome, though this is never stated outright (hardly anything ever is in Wolfe) so he records the names of towns and people as he hears them, so places like Sparta become Rope, because the Greek word  spartē means rope. There are a million examples of this in the book, which adds a whole other layer on top. But back to the story, we come to understand that he’s a mercenary soldier who was fighting for Xerxes during his attempted conquest of ancient Greece. We come to understand that he was probably cursed by Demeter and needs to travel to her temple to be healed. There is very interesting stuff about the various moon-associated goddesses and the triple goddess of Persophone, Hecate, and Demeter. There is lots about the Great Mother and whether or not the different names across different cultures, such as Demeter and Gaea who have very similar attributes, are the same characters. And, while it is all very confusing, it’s also a lot of fun, especially if you’re into ancient Greek shit. There’s a great scene where a necromancer drunkenly boasts he can raise the dead at a party, people bet that he can’t and everyone walks to a graveyard to see what’s up. There’s another soldier with Latro for most of the book who’s African and can’t speak Greek but he can understand it, which is a situation I’ve found myself in half a dozen times and is rendered quite well. One last thought, at the end of the book, like the last few pages, *spoiler alert* we find out that there is a werewolf. Latro, of course, has forgotten who he’s looking at when the wolf changes back to a man, but we are lead to believe that it’s a character that we’ve already met. I’m not going to speculate as to who that character is here, but I will point out something about werewolves this made me notice. Werewolves are, as far as I can tell, always men. Unlike the Vampire or the Zombie, which have both male and female depictions, or the Siren, which is always a woman, the Werewolf is a male-monster. This seems strange because they’re so associated with the moon, which is traditionally thought of as female. In this book the relationship between the various moon goddesses is deeply explored and explains why there is a werewolf. What gives? Irregardless, I’m excited to read the other two in the series.