Soldier of Sidon BY gene wolfe

Book III of The Soldier Series

©Inchoatus Group

February 1, 2007

A critical review...

Title: Soldier of Sidon, Book III of The Soldier Series

Author: Gene Wolfe

Publisher: Tor

Length: 312 pages in hardcover

Cover Art: (Jacket art: David Grove)—an excellent cover: it fits well with the series and evokes a kind of scarred, blurred classic sense as if being viewed as a frieze on the side of an ancient building.

Rating

… It’s difficult to recommend this book on its own but as an installment in The Solider Series and a book by one of the finest writers in the field, it is the best way to spend a mere 312 pages.

Gene Wolfe Fans                                          BUY (6/7)

Speculative Fiction Audience                        BUY (5/7)

General Literature Readership                      BUY (6/7)

“As with many of Wolfe's works, the Soldier series prominently features unreliable narration, and Soldier of Sidon is no exception.  Latro still lacks short-term memory, and as such what he reports in his journal is often inaccurate, vague, and for the inattentive reader, confusing.  For instance, if Latro writes something in chapter three that becomes important in chapter twenty, due to his lack of memory he will not recognize its significance; it is up to the reader uncover such revelations.”

—Arthur Bangs, sffworld.com

This is too common and too easy. Announcing that Wolfe features an unreliable narrator is like claiming that Tolkien features hobbits or Baskin & Robbins features ice-cream. Duh. There’s so much more in trying to understand why these narrators are unreliable and what it means. In our review, we liken this experience of trying to decipher Latro’s experiences like trying to remember the act of reading itself: full of tenuous connections, biases, and fragments. Bangs waffles around something else: why so many people find it so hard to read Wolfe. “… it is up to the reader to uncover such revelations.” Well, yeah… we guess so. But honestly, who the hell else is it up to, really? If it were spelled out and dumped in your lap then it would be philosophy or something other than art. It’s why you’re reading that’s important. If you’re reading to have revelations given unto you, then read Wolfe and expect some work. If you’re reading for entertainment or other prurient interests, then way too much work her for you and you should look elsewhere.

“Soldier of Sidon is, like the two previous Soldier books, the story of a warrior cast into events of larger significance than himself…. He reports his story from the perspective of a simple man, using simple language. He observes the right things. Two short chapters into Sidon, and Gene Wolfe has managed to calmly grab the sense of place and of character that Steven Pressfield struggled to achieve in an entire novel.”

—Keifus, “Keifus Writes!”

This is really weird: it would never have occurred to us to compare Soldier of Sidon to Pressfield, who is doing something completely different in scale and purpose. We would argue that Pressfield is attempting to bring the grand scheme of events in a fairly accurate but fictionalized account to a deeply personal level for the modern reader. If he succeeds, he gives you an understanding and appreciation for the people and events of that time. We would argue that Wolfe is doing the opposite: he is taking the grand scheme of events and how it shapes the character of a single man. This is a deeply intimate and personal account of a single human and it gives us little or nothing of the flavor or great events of the time. Obviously, Keifus doesn’t like Pressfield—which we disagree with—but to draw this sort of comparison as a platform to criticize Pressfield and praise Wolfe is foolish.

“But there was a catch. The notion of Latro recording and rereading his life story every day assumed a comic cumbersomeness. Picture our hero carting around the accumulating scrolls of his life and spending about 12 hours each day refreshing himself on the ever-growing database, leaving no time for adventures. The point of diminishing returns had been reached by the end of Arete, which is probably why there was no third book for 15 years.”

—Paul Di Filippo, scifi.com

This is an interesting notion but we wouldn’t call it a “catch.” In fact, one of the interesting things about Latro is this: he is often extremely uninterested in reading his own diary. More often than not he is coerced into doing it by his friends and/or associates. We argue here that one of the only things that scroll is not is a diary or autobiography or even account of current events—it’s more of a centering mechanism by which Latro purges himself of concerns or personal demons. Eventually, the scrolls themselves become a kind of demon. One can easily imagine Latro creating these from time to time only to burn them or willfully destroy them (a kind of suicide or exorcism). One has to be ready to explore the depths.

What We Say                                                        

One of our readers once observed that for us here at Inchoatus, Gene Wolfe is a “talismanic” author. How can he not be? He is doing things and asking questions that no one else is doing. We ourselves once stated that he is most reminiscent of the dramatic monologues of the poet Robert Browning (Ulysses, My Last Duchess, Andrea del Sarto, etc.)… a comparison we would hardly dare on any author. One doesn’t read Wolfe so much as experience him—he is impossible to appreciate on a first read.

He is also a challenge and it makes placing his rating rather difficult. For those individuals steeped in the traditions of Wolfe and the problems he poses, this book will be a delight. Not a crown jewel, certainly, but something read and relished and debated. For the mainstream fan he is a challenge. R. Scott Bakker once said that he isn’t “smart enough to figure out all of his tricks,” … completely untrue for someone who has tackled Kant but certainly a measure of the challenge that he poses. Steven Brust claimed that reading him was like eating caviar: “It is a lot of work to get to. You have to open the can, you have to make sure the refrigeration is exactly perfect. You have to have the right atmosphere, and you have to approach it with the proper reverence if you're going to get anything out of the experience. But if you do, my god, is it worth it!” This kind of challenge is daunting to many people who are often known to say, “Why can’t he just write a straightforward story?!” We have lamented his accessibility on this website. For the speculative fiction fan, he probably isn’t as popular as he should be. In fact, we feel that this book in particular and Wolfe in general probably appeals more to the mainstream reader of literature than those in the genre.

As an example of the challenge, if one were to ask us the very reasonable questions: “What is this book about?” we find ourselves unable to answer in anything approaching a sensible way. Really, what is this book about?

At the most literal level, it is about a man who loses his memory every night as he sleeps. His powers of language, cognition, learned skills, etc. are intact but due to a presumed wound to the head he cannot recall the people he has met, their actions, or his, nor his home, his family, his beliefs or anything at the conscious level. To be precise, he is bereft of conscious memory. He sporadically keeps a diary and from this we learn of his travels through Egypt as he is hired on as muscle for a river-faring captain exploring the Nile. They have a variety of very local adventures—nothing at all on the scale of space opera or epic fantasy: the world would scarcely notice if the ship and its occupants suddenly vanished altogether.

But Wolfe is always doing more than you think. It is a book about memory and identity. Where Soldier of Arete and Soldier of the Mist were concerned largely with cultural identity and manipulation, Soldier of Sidon concentrates much more fiercely on honesty, conscience, and the sense of identity that is known a priori rather than acquired. Somehow, we find a Latro who is openly distrustful and skeptical of the people around him—he has somehow lost the almost childlike naiveté he exhibited before following the Thermopylae and Salamis. More importantly, we are given to understand the things that he does remember: how some events seep into his unconscious and become part of him and understood at an a priori level existing just below conscious thought. We see this in how his feelings emerge from his subconscious to inform his conscious thought surrounding his Myt-ser’eu, his obsession with his sword Falcata, and more. Yet other events have no hold on him whatever. Latro has always been conscientious but now his sense of ethics are much clearer—and it forces the reader to ask, where do these ethics come from? How are these remembered—this sense of right and wrong—when all else is forgotten? How is it that he can be misled by villains into acting illegally but he can never, ever be enticed into acting dishonorably? As before, the fascination with these Solider books is how Latro negotiates these occurrences and reveals the Platonic ideal of a priori ethics at every turn.

As before, the book is about the act of authorship. For whom is Latro writing? It is not for himself… at least not solely. We know this because he so seldom reads his own work despite the fact that his diary is the ostensible purpose: to recreate his conscious memory. Yet time and again he is shockingly cavalier about his own work: he often must be coerced and nagged into reading it. Writing in it, however, is somehow a way in which he centers himself and makes sense of the world around him. It is as if this man, who cannot seem to fully participate in the world around him can somehow fill that lack through his writings. And in this, he was successfully—or so the mythology would have us believe as his scrolls, so useless to him, have immortalized his works now that they’re “translated” by “GW.”

There is more. Reading Soldier of Sidon is akin to the act of reading itself. The story is necessarily told in fits of lucidity and assumed accuracy. The reader is left constantly guessing about the identities of the characters, since they must be re-learned through Latro at each turn and their names and faces shift subtly at every mis-remembered/half-remembered page. The goals of the expedition and the people around Latro are at the mercy of his capricious memory and the reader learns of this in fits and starts like flashes of lightning illuminating a large floor mosaic in an otherwise dark night. How utterly the reader is accustomed to relying upon the author to maintain a constancy: a constancy of purpose, of names, of places… when that maintenance is weakened and faulty, what then? The interesting thing is this: try and remember a good book you read two or three years ago, how do you remember it? How would you relay it, in writing, to others around you? Very likely, you would relay it in the fits and starts exactly as you end up reading Latro in real-time. It’s an amazing achievement, in a way, to obscure the story behind the things that Latro chooses and is able to remember.

The gift of Wolfe is in his tiny observations that explode out of the page (again, in ways very reminiscent of Browning for who has not heard “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp” as a line that exploded out of the poem Adnrea del Sarto? Surely a phrase that will long outlive the poem itself.). An example here: “Myt-ser’eu points to words, presses herself close, and tickles me, asking what those words mean. Sahuset frightened her, I think. She would endear herself to me more than ever; that is plain. Women are ever affectionate where there is danger, and there would be less danger if it were not so.”

That line: there would be less danger if it were not so. These are the Wolfe assertions that live with you long past the ending of the book. They are the lines you come back to and mull. Latro, in his utter naiveté, utters these anecdotes that force the reader into a mode of examination.

Soldier of Sidon is a work of art and should be approached in that vein. It cannot be read on an airplane—it must be read in quiet. It cannot be read during commercial breaks of Lost or the kids’ Little League game—it requires uninterrupted concentration. It is a book for readers. Are you a reader? If so, then it should enjoy our highest recommendation. But it is necessarily a limiting factor of the book itself—by its nature, it limits its own audience.

Place in the Genre                                               

Wolfe’s books are like the anti-screenplay. There are too many books on the market today that read exactly like a screenplay. They are visual, tactile works replete with surprise endings, editing that can only be copied from lurching, leaping soundbites of shows aired between commercials, and little or no subtext: everything is completely literal. Wolfe is the opposite. We do not believe that his books will ever be successfully rendered into cinema. They are completely mental in nature—they are inextricable from the mind of the narrator and the disassociation of the narrator from the story, which is necessary for any screenplay version, would completely destroy the artistry of the work. At the literal level, these are quite boring plots that would hardly entertain anyone. The fascination, as with Robert Browning, comes from the psychology of the narrator, the observations of how the inner mind reacts to the world around it, as with Joyce, and how the act of recording and narration is itself an act of subterfuge and deceit despite the best intentions of the narrator. What is the genre for that? Speculative fiction affords the kinds of settings that Wolfe needs to explore many of these themes but he is beyond any claim the genre might have on him. He is the author that, aside from Tolkien in the realm of fantasy, exerts the greatest force on authors writing today.

Who Should Read and Who Should Avoid         

While the book is one that can stand on its own, it probably enjoys its greatest resonance with readers who are familiar with Latro in the Mist (or the single volumes, Soldier in the Mist and Soldier of Arete). In fact, its very interesting to compare these Latros and even ponder if they are the same Latros at all (they probably are but they are so different it makes one wonder). There is probably in many of these readers a hunger to finally know Latro: his crimes and his past and what made him such a fearsome warrior. These are also the readers that revel in Wolfe’s puzzle—not something we’re actually terribly interested in but a pleasure for many—and there are many clues here. As we mentioned, though, Wolfe is a challenge and without the “proper reverence” as Brust put it, he should not be approached. We continue to compare him to Browning though for accessibility many people are probably more prone to compare him to James Joyce. That can serve as well as any to an analogue for approachability by new readers. Certainly, readers who are perfectly content with Terry Goodkind, Robert Jordan, Dan Brown, Michael Crichton and other screenplay wannabes should avoid this book. Readers who are looking for straightforward and well-told suspense and adventure books should look to George R Martin or perhaps Chris Moriarty for these books.

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