Soldier of Arete by Gene Wolfe

Years ago I read The Shadow of the Torturer and the three subsequent volumes (I hear there are more now), patiently waiting for the appropriate volumes to be returned to the library so I could read them in sequence. I thought it a very good series, and never got around to acquiring the set myself. (An odd contradiction, I know) His name came up recently and I figured I should see what he’d written recently.

Soldier of Arete turns out to have been the middle volume in a series—and it turns out not to matter much. Latro is a warrior, of hero caliber, who often sees the gods—but who cannot remember anything but the current day, and must rely on his papyrus diary as his memory when he has time to read it. The era is shortly after the defeat of the Great King by the Greek alliance. Wolfe has fun with the Greek names: which group is "Thought" and which is "Rope" and so on. Latro is traveling with his loyal slave girl, a mantis, a soiled dryad (shouldn’t have done that, Latro—now Artemis is mad at you), and "the black man" on what initially seems a simple but difficult mission, but gets deeply complicated by his new directive from Artemis. Gods and ghosts and magic are central to the book, and I suspect the confusing ending is related to the missing first volume.

Were it not for the ending I’d confidently say "read it," but I think I need to find the first volume before I can properly judge it. Wolfe is imaginative, has done his homework on ancient Greece and Thrace, and has the chutzpah and skill to pull off a prose passage by Pindar.