Soldier of Sidon by Gene Wolfe

The Soldier of Sidon is Latro the Phoenecian or is he Lucius the Roman or someone else entirely? No one really knows including himself. Every night he forgets what has happened the previous day ( my wife says that I have the same problem) and so has to write down all his actions and thoughts in the evening and these writings form the book. This is, in fact, the third novel that Wolfe has written about this man and in this style. The first, Soldier of the Mist, I read in 1988 and the next, Soldier of Arete, in 1991 and it was not until 2006 that he published this volume which will not be the last judging by the ending. Latro/Lucius is in Egypt brought there by Muslak a ships captain who says that he owes him his life. Muslak buys them two young women from the Temple of Hathor (my kind of religion!) and they sail down the Nile to sell their cargo of hides. At this time Egypt is part of the Persian Empire and the Satrap hires them to explore the Nile to it's source. Latro, we discover, is a renowned soldier and his faulty memory retains his fighting skills and the languages he has learned in the past whilst wiping out everything else. I must admit that I am not usualy into this kind of whimsical fantasy and it is a tribute to the writing skill of Gene Wolfe that I have swallowed this whole. I am sure that another volume is in the offing and I just hope that we do have to wait another fifteen years for it as I may not last that long.