Latro had suffered a wound to his head in battle, a wound that stopped him from forming new memories and obliterated many of his older ones. (As partial recompense, his crippling allowed him to see and converse with the many gods of the ancient world—assuming they were not hallucinations, a safe bet given their accurate advice and omniscience.) His only recourse for maintaining a halfway normal life was to keep a diary (this very book we're reading) and refamiliarize himself with it each morning when he awoke in ignorance.

Accompanied by certain steadfast companions, such as the Ethiopian named Seven Lions and the female child slave named Io, and meeting scores of transient ones, Latro journeyed up and down the Mediterranean seeking a cure and his backstory.

His tale continued in Soldier of Arete (1989) (both books being collected much later as Latro in the Mist [2003]), a sequel that left Latro fairly well off, but no more cured or informed than at the start. (Except that a dying man once recognized him and called him "Lucius.") Then, from Wolfe, no more about Latro till now.

We meet Latro again in Egypt, or Riverland, or Kemet, far from his old haunts. He has been brought there, sans his autobiographical personal library, by a new friend, an independent sea captain named Muslak. Muslak tells Latro that he has reason to believe that Latro's quest for self and memory might succeed in this foreign land. (Latro has left behind a wife, presumably Io, although it's never said.)

Latro, keeping a new log, agrees. The men secure a paying assignment that dovetails with Latro's urges: The ruling satrap of all Kemet commissions them, like Lewis and Clark, to undertake an expedition up the Nile to Nubia, to chart and explore those mysterious lands for the government. After securing two women as temporary "river wives"—Neht-nefret for Muslak and Myt-ser'eu for Latro—the expedition sets out. Also with them are soldiers and three government agents: Qanju, Sahuset and Thotmaktef. These latter three men are all eerie in one way or another, and seem to have secret agendas of their own.

Up the vast river they sail, plagued by a shipboard vampire and stopping at various towns and cities, encountering the full panoply of citizens, creatures and gods of ancient Egypt. But when they reach the borders of Nubia, everything goes pear-shaped, and Latro's very life will depend on the good will of a forgotten person from his past.

The man who knew too little

Let's talk first about Wolfe's initial conceit for this series, before we look at its newest iteration.

Obviously, the big hook for this whole saga is Latro's neurological quirk, and how it will affect the form and tone of the book, distinguishing it from fantasies of similar provenance. With his fondness for unreliable narrators, Wolfe has struck gold here: a tale-teller who will be forced to present an incomplete, enigmatic account of events not through any ill will or self-serving motives, but simply because he's incapable of doing otherwise. Moreover, the narrator's character will be channeled by his deficiencies into that of a somewhat naïve, though not untainted, boy-man, favored of the gods, a la Chance in Jerzy Kosinski's Being There (1970).

Having established this format and affect, which is of course really inseparable from the subject matter of the book, Wolfe next chose to portray with a depth of scholarship and tangibility the ancient world of the Mediterranean, a period and place as alien as any of his other venues, where the characters embody almost a Julian Jaynes-style premodern bipolar mentality. The conceit and subject matter worked perfectly together.

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.

Then, eureka! Wolfe simply and blithely discards everything for a fresh start in Egypt. In a series whose motif has been radical disjunctions, this is the biggest and freshest of all. And it works wonders.

The new book has been shorn of the clottedness that bogged down the end pages of Arete. Wolfe is an even better and more pared-down writer than he was a decade and a half ago. The figurative "mist" is gone from the text, and the landscapes and actions and characters are lit by a stark yet affectionate Nilotic sunlight. Latro's personality and quest remain consistent, his life is still full of puzzling lacunae, but within each day he moves with more "maturity." His relationships, expecially with his lover, Myt-ser'eu, are deeper somehow, and more affecting. And his saga is more straightforward, in an old-fashioned adventure sense.

In fact, one gets the impression that Wolfe is deliberately channeling H. Rider Haggard, Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs, taking their core tropes and filtering them through his more refined sensibilities and mastery of language. This book becomes, then, a winning combination of literary ambition and pulp extravagance.

And we can certainly expect further and more timely sequels, since by the end, Latro is no closer to his identity, and possessed of a new quest, for his sword Falcata, which is now revealed to be a talisman of some importance.

Please make a note to yourself to stay tuned!