Review of Soldier of the Mist by Gene Wolfe

Of the variations of loss mankind faces, memory is one of the hardest.  Less physically and more existentially painful, memory deprivation is tantamount to losing one’s self; without the past to inform identity in the present, the mind can find itself in a stranger’s body.  Alzheimer’s an extreme, there are subtler variations of memory loss which nevertheless smear the personal conception of self across a subjective peep show of the remembered past.  Entering this gulf of equivocated identity is Gene Wolfe’s brilliant 1986 novel Soldier of the Mist.  The story of a soldier in ancient Greece suffering anterograde amnesia (the inability to form long term memories), the world through his eyes appears unstable and off-putting.  But as time moves on, the reader realizes the man’s condition is not as far removed from a healthy mind’s perspective of memory and the past as it would seem. 

Writing an account of his day on a scroll before going to sleep and encountering a scroll with the words “Read This” in the morning, Latro the soldier learns and relearns anew every day who he is, long term memory gone.  Struck on the head in battle, he retains hazy memories of his youth and language skills, but little else.  Name and home, for example, are a mystery.  Life literally taken day to day, instinct and the will of others guide his life.  On the losing side of the battle, he begins Soldier of the Mist a slave to the victors. Prized by them, he is allowed to befriend an Ethiopian and a poet, and soon comes into a friendship with a young slave girl—she the biggest help in retaining his notion of self.  After the battle a divine intervention sets him on a group pilgrimage to the Shining Mother. The circumstances of life and the condition of his memory quickly shift the focus, however.  His goals evolving with each stop on the map, it’s meeting the necromancer Eurykles that effects the most change.  Witnessing the resurrection of a corpse in a cemetery one evening, Latro’s perception of the gods, the living, and everything between intertwine to lead him closer to who he is.  Trouble is, he may never remember.

Review of The Glamour by Christopher Priest

Christopher Priest’s 1981 The Affirmation is a novel that superbly outlays the all-too-human manner in which we stifle the world—repress reality—to keep life warm and charming, no ugly burrs or bumps to spoil the vision.  But what of the past, our memories of times good and bad?  Are these also malleable facets of existence and not the concrete recollections we would have them be?  In sideways-brain fashion, Priest’s 1984 The Glamour continues the author’s interrogation of perception by tackling precisely this question.

We first meet Richard Grey convalescing in a rural English hospital.  One of the victims of a bomb attack at a police station, multiple injuries binding him to a wheelchair, he is slowly recovering to mobility.  Memory likewise unstable, he remembers nothing in the handful of weeks prior to the attack, and as a result is undergoing therapy with the hospital’s psychologist and psychiatrist.  Receiving a major surprise one day, he is introduced to a woman named Susan who claims to have been his girlfriend in that blank space of memory.  Her face triggering no memories, Grey places upon himself the task of getting to know her as well as he can in the hopes it will to revive the time.  He gets much more than he asked for.

Review of "The Affirmation" by Christopher Priest

I’ve heard Christopher Priest’s 1981 novel The Affirmation described as regressive, an ouroboros eating its own tail, a Moeibus strip.  While there is undoubtedly an M.C. Escher quality to the book—a blurring of reality—the beginning and end are simply too different to form a contiguous whole reverting back on itself.  Opposite ends of a spectrum in fact, the appeal of the novel is immersing one’s self in the subjective reality Priest slowly unwraps and getting lost in the world of memories as a result.  

The true nature of The Affirmation requiring thought, the easy part is relaxing throughout the journey.  Priest patiently and precisely lays down the text—words like railroad ties on a Sunday train to the country—the story moving effortlessly along.  Novel as art, the sublime prose lulls the reader into the deceivingly mundane story of Peter Sinclair.  Though seeming an ordinary man, a rash of bad luck forces him into a cottage in the country to rethink life.  His father’s death, a bad breakup, and being made redundant at his London job all combine to drive him into a retrospective of sorts, trying to discover what brought him to such an impasse.  The details of memory hazy, Sinclair decides to write his autobiography in the hope the words manifested on paper will clarify his problems.  Family, girlfriends, and lovers all converging as he writes, Sinclair’s real troubles only begin sitting down to the typewriter.

For those who enjoyed the Nolan brothers’ film Memento, The Affirmation will be a delight.  Limitations of the written word innately less imposing than film’s, Priest fully utilizes the novel form to examine the relationship between memory, the past, and reality.  One way in which he takes advantage is to use a plot device literati everywhere love: the text within a text.  Dangerously pretentious, Priest’s use of Sinclair’s autobiography as a tool to comment upon the human condition is brilliant and is every reason why the usage of the device is so highly rated.  In an intra-textual fashion not unlike Nabokov’s Pale Fire (though with less exotic language), Sinclair’s autobiography plays a key role in relating the theme of memory to the examination of character, proving Priest’s talents well founded.

That being said, the medium is the book’s only real fault.  Novels needing to be read in linear fashion, one sentence, one word, one letter at a time, that is, rather than viewed as a whole, the transition points of plot are raw and exposed, nothing any author can do to completely disguise them.  Priest doing the best with the tools at his disposal, there are nevertheless jumping off points in The Affirmation that a visual artist could easily blend into other parts of their image with few the wiser.  Without spoiling the major premise, suffice to say if the narrative had attempted to slip smoothly back and forth between the selected plot points—like merging red to purple to blue in a color wheel—the novel would have become abstract poetry.  Thankfully, Priest prioritized the transparency of his message and sided with clarity toward progressing the story.  The individual transition points may glare, but upon finishing the novel, the connect-the-dots form a meaningful picture.

In the end, The Affirmation is a cerebral read examining the subjectivity of existence in a manner defying categorization.  Despite being shelved alongside Priest’s other sci-fi work, genre presence is limited.  Existential in nature, the novel uses one or two tropes of Philip K. Dick, but thankfully none of his style; Priest’s prose is literary and a pleasure to relax into.  Like Robert Louis Stevenson, it is clean and smooth, the right word forever pulled out of the bag at the right time, the reader’s understanding both ex- and implicit as a result.  From the Yeat’s quote at the outset yearning for something more, to the Proust-like sobering conclusion, literary science fiction does not get much better than The Affirmation.