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A review by rebeccacider
Soldier of the Mist by Gene Wolfe
2.0
Considering that it's been two months since I started that book (and it's not long), I think it's safe to assume that I'm not going to finish that one.
Soldier of the Mist wasn't dreadful - it has a great premise, a narrator who has anterograde amnesia (a la Memento), blundering through a Persian War-era Greece and becoming increasingly in touch with the Greek otherworld of gods and monsters. Wolfe is a fine stylist and historical writer, and I initially enjoyed reading this.
I lost interest because, as with his much later book The Sorceror's House, most of the characters felt unreal to me. The complex mechanism of Wolfe's plot drives everything, which could work if only I sympathized with any of the characters. The dialogue is usually okay, but the characters have shallow motivations and flat personalities, and their interactions sometimes feel unnatural. Our protagonist is understandably passive and mysterious - as an amnesiac, he doesn't know who he is or what exactly is happening to him - but he doesn't seem to have normal motivations or desires and often has weirdly unemotional reactions. In one striking and bizarre scene, a prepubescent girl who has attached herself to his entourage tells him that she and an older woman have both been raped while imprisoned. The narrator doesn't seem to understand what she's saying and doesn't show concern. I'm not sure if this WTF moment was an intentional attempt to alienate us from the narrator, but it read as unbelievable.
Since The Sorceror's House had an identical problem - unlikable, unreal characters - I got the feeling that this wasn't just the tone that Wolfe had chosen for his book, it's the way he writes, with books full of people who aren't people. I drifted away from the book and don't think I'll be returning.
Soldier of the Mist wasn't dreadful - it has a great premise, a narrator who has anterograde amnesia (a la Memento), blundering through a Persian War-era Greece and becoming increasingly in touch with the Greek otherworld of gods and monsters. Wolfe is a fine stylist and historical writer, and I initially enjoyed reading this.
I lost interest because, as with his much later book The Sorceror's House, most of the characters felt unreal to me. The complex mechanism of Wolfe's plot drives everything, which could work if only I sympathized with any of the characters. The dialogue is usually okay, but the characters have shallow motivations and flat personalities, and their interactions sometimes feel unnatural. Our protagonist is understandably passive and mysterious - as an amnesiac, he doesn't know who he is or what exactly is happening to him - but he doesn't seem to have normal motivations or desires and often has weirdly unemotional reactions. In one striking and bizarre scene, a prepubescent girl who has attached herself to his entourage tells him that she and an older woman have both been raped while imprisoned. The narrator doesn't seem to understand what she's saying and doesn't show concern. I'm not sure if this WTF moment was an intentional attempt to alienate us from the narrator, but it read as unbelievable.
Since The Sorceror's House had an identical problem - unlikable, unreal characters - I got the feeling that this wasn't just the tone that Wolfe had chosen for his book, it's the way he writes, with books full of people who aren't people. I drifted away from the book and don't think I'll be returning.