Rating: 
Summary: Wolfe, switching gears
Review: "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: 
Summary: reprint of two powerful ancient historical fantasies
Review: "Soldier of the Mist". In 479 BC, Latro a Roman mercenary receives a devastating head injury during battle. The consequences of his wound are loss of short-term memory as his brain erases recent events just over twelve hours old. Latro also appears to have gained the ability to talk with invisible beings, Gods, other strange creatures, and the dead. To keep track of all he has done and confronts, Latro keeps a journal that tells of his journey while the Athenians and Persians remain at war. "Soldier of Arete". Latro still has amnesia, which erases his memory of the previous day. He still keeps his journal. He has become a Greek slave and fights on the side of the tall strong Amazons as he continues to travel all of Greece. He even has his own "slave" in his quest to regain his memory and perhaps as important his free status. He still talks with the Gods and those other strange creatures including the dead. This is a reprint of two powerful ancient historical fantasies released separately in the 1980s. LATRO IN THE MIST is actually better as a two in one book because "Soldier of Arete" makes more sense if "Soldier of the Mist" is read first. The story lines are Latro's account of his odyssey, which brings to life much of Ancient Greece during the fifth century BC. Gene Wolfe is at his best with this ironic fantasy that provides a deep historical fiction with mythological elements. Harriet Klausner
Rating:
Summary: reprint of two powerful ancient historical fantasies
Review: "Soldier of the Mist". In 479 BC, Latro a Roman mercenary receives a devastating head injury during battle. The consequences of his wound are loss of short-term memory as his brain erases recent events just over twelve hours old. Latro also appears to have gained the ability to talk with invisible beings, Gods, other strange creatures, and the dead. To keep track of all he has done and confronts, Latro keeps a journal that tells of his journey while the Athenians and Persians remain at war. "Soldier of Arete". Latro still has amnesia, which erases his memory of the previous day. He still keeps his journal. He has become a Greek slave and fights on the side of the tall strong Amazons as he continues to travel all of Greece. He even has his own "slave" in his quest to regain his memory and perhaps as important his free status. He still talks with the Gods and those other strange creatures including the dead. This is a reprint of two powerful ancient historical fantasies released separately in the 1980s. LATRO IN THE MIST is actually better as a two in one book because "Soldier of Arete" makes more sense if "Soldier of the Mist" is read first. The story lines are Latro's account of his odyssey, which brings to life much of Ancient Greece during the fifth century BC. Gene Wolfe is at his best with this ironic fantasy that provides a deep historical fiction with mythological elements. Harriet Klausner
Rating:
Summary: Wolfe is a Treasure--here he is at his accessible best
Review: As with all of Wolfe's writing, he couldn't possibly care less that people understand him on the first, second, or third reading. This has given him a spirited and fiercely loyal audience but has also hurt his overall appeal. Latro is no exception in this regard. People who call it meandering are right. The plot goes any direction but straight ahead. People call it confusing and they are right. Yet this is the reason we read Wolfe: because finding out about the plot is exactly part of the fun and understanding why the confusion exists is all the importance in the reading. Latro will earn a treasured place in a Wolfe's corpus and we believe it will remain Wolfe's most accessible work that maintains the maximum rewards that reading his novels brings. There is a rumored third installment in the "soldier series" on the horizon and it will be interesting to see if it can match the vlaue of these first novels. In light of the recent cinematic productions of Troy and Alexander along with the popularity of The Gates of Fire and Mary Renault (not to mention the undimmed popularity of Herodotus) we thing there is a huge audience craving for fiction from this era. It could even be said that Latro has opened up this genre for a whole series of authors in this regard.
WHO SHOULD READ THIS:
We can recommend Latro for two audiences: those who've read Wolfe but haven't yet gotten around to Latro and those who are intrigued with the idea of reading Wolfe but don't want to commit to the twelve novels that comprise the solar cycle. Those effete snobs who think that speculative fiction doesn't have any writers operating within it that can match the anointed ones pulling down mainstream awards should definitely read this book: it'll put a stop to those snotty little arguments. There can be no doubt that Wolfe is operating on a level that very, very few authors can match and of those that can, most of them are dead and reside in anthologies of literature to be studied by earnest students in universities.
WHO SHOULD PASS:
However, Wolfe's skill is exactly on of the reasons that people should consider passing on these books. Reading his books is hard. Whenever we're done, we need to take a break and read pulp novels for a while. It takes a lot of time and energy and generally a few false starts. Whenever there's a big gap in new material on Inchoatus you can make a good bet that we're tackling something else that Wolfe wrote. Our point is, we're not being elitist about this: reading great literature is usually very, very hard and demanding--just like polishing the guns down at the gym on a regular basis is hard. You've got to know what you're getting in to: a lot of unfamiliar words, no help from the author regarding plot, and a cast of characters that will often do some astonishingly bewildering things. But the rewards are great. Don't tell us some guy named Jordan or Goodkind or Brooks is the best author around until you've tackled this stuff and given it a try.
READ THE ENTIRE REVIEW AT INCHOATUS.COM
Rating: 
Summary: Fragments From Distant Shores
Review: Gene Wolfe's reputation for complexity and ambiguity find full expression in this omnibus of two historical fantasy novels, Soldier in the Mist (1986) and Soldier of Arete (1989). They follow the journey of Latro, a Roman soldier who receives a head injury in a battle outside the temple of Demeter (based on an actual battle in 479 B.C. as chronicled by Herodotus) which gives him both a peculiar form of amnesia and the ability to interact with supernatural beings.
Wolfe should be praised for the ambitiousness of these novels in trying to portray "Greece as the Greeks experienced it." In the introduction he claims that the Latro novels are a remarkable archaeological discovery, the diaries of Latro etched into a scroll, coming to us as a translation of a translation. This explains the archaic, sometimes stilted language used and the peculiar place names (Athens is "Thought," Sparta is "Rope"). Fortunately a map and glossary are provided, and both prove indispensable.
It takes some effort to get acclimated to the language. Sometimes it seems that nothing happens, where a wandering, quest narrative takes over as in other novels by Wolfe; at other times many events are crowded into a few sentences with clues buried in the text. We are limited by what Latro remembers, what he chooses to write down, and what we gather on our own. Latro's problems are also the reader's: Who to trust? What is the truth? How do we retain what is valuable from the past? The feelings he has for Io and Pharetra, for example, transcend events and his experience with them, leaving behind a kind of bone wisdom by which he knows them. The novels are something of a puzzle, with Latro's quest that of trying to find his identity and, like Odysseus, his way home to his friends and family.
To know the ancient world as the ancients experienced it means getting inside their consciousness and adopting an outlook in which the divine and the human intersect. References to gods, visitations to temples, and sacrifices are all part of daily life. The presence of the divine is even more real for Latro, who can see and converse with beings, even the dead, that others cannot. These are among my favorite passages. They are appropriately dreamlike. They provide opportunity to reflect on truths about humans and gods. They suggest that there are multiple levels to reality beyond the physical and rational. And they provide a vehicle for Wolfe's flights of fancy.
Unfortunately, Latro's amnesia also deprives the novels of structure. Events accrue rather than build to a climax. The first book has no ending while the second wraps up in a hurry. Characters appear and disappear, change identities and motives. Often I had to re-read sentences and entire paragraphs to follow what was going on. I do not know whether to attribute my backtracking to cleverness by Wolfe, tossing the reader into the mist along with Latro, or to attribute it to failure of imagination, Wolfe losing control over his materials. Many readers will likely lose their patience. Perhaps the strongest evidence that the novels lack coherence is that plans for a sequel have been shelved.
Yet there is much to be said for an author who can hold my attention for over six hundred pages, and Wolfe's novels have always aspired to multiple levels of meaning. One could read Latro's plight as a metaphor for a modern world which has forgotten its past. Although our world is buzzing with technology and information, it may be losing fundamental truths about how to live. Latro is a good man in a brutal world, accomplishing various heroic deeds, at one point hailed as the god Ares, and embodying arete, which the glossary defines as "the virtues of a soldier, ranging from cleanliness and love of order to courage in the face of death." The novels remind us of the relevance of the past, the human virtues and vices which endure over time, as well as the role that memory plays in making one's way in the world.
Rating:
Summary: Two of Wolfe's greatest novels in one lovely package
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting idea results in one of Wolfe's lesser works
Review: 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:
Summary: Haunting and wonderful
Review: Reading Wolfe's works can be a labor, but this book is amazing.
Some will not like Wolfe's style, because you are required to pay attention on every page. If you have a minor lapse, you may find yourself hopelessly lost in the next chapter. Don't pick this up if you are looking for a light read, but if you take the time, it will amply repay you.
I don't want to detail why I like it so much, because it will spoil too much. If you are interested in Wolfe, give this a try. If you like it, pick up the Shadow of the Torturer series.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, Poetic and Memorable
Review: The prose in this novel is so dense it reads like poetry. While this is a difficult novel to read, the story of Latro, an amnesiac mercenary, alternately directed by a series of slaves, masters, prostitutes and kings, is definitely a worthy one. Despite his memory loss, the things that Latro takes for granted are ones that are wholly out of place to the reader, for despite the triteness of sacrifice in Greek times, I imagine we must flinch a little at each, and at the harshness of living conditions.
Wolfe doesn't let the reader off the hook either, choosing to translate place names in many cases so that the reader has to think back to ancient history to figure out where he is and where he's going. He uses many alternative names for the gods, so this too can't be taken for granted, but must be considered, so that instead of each god being only a name, you come to see the significance and the history behind each one.
Rating:
Summary: Probably the Most Original Piece of Ancient Greek Fiction
Review: The soldier series was my introduction to Wolfe. I was sitting around the bookstore reading the backs of random books in an attempt to find a new author. Sure enough the premise of this two-part book caught my attention. The book draws its premise, characters, locations, and themes from ancient greek culture and mythology, but that's were it ends. While the main character may participate in actually historical battles and locations, the actually history isn't the main focus behind the plot line in my opinion. I say my opinion cause there is great debate surrounding whether Latro is a historical statement. Wolfe uses the Ancient Greek setting as vehicle to drive his story and doesn't let the history become the story. Latro moves about Ancient Greece lost and things occur in a very haphazard manner and yet some how Wolfe manages to tie it all together in single stroke. I've read novels were writers write them selves into holes and attempt to end the impossible and fail. Wolfe ends more then the impossible and does it better then I've ever seen it done. Ill recommend this book to any one who enjoys Wolfe, enjoys Greek mythology, or simply hates typical cliché fantasy trash. And if you haven't read Wolfe I suggest grabbing Book of the New Sun, which is more or less considered his finest work.
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