Yes, OK, I know, I link to and read a lot of Vox’s work. What can I say, I’m a huge fan. He’s great at what he does, and his point of view is often entertaining, usually controversial (to small minds; I almost always find myself agreeing with him- almost always), and always educational. Yet as good as he is today, he didn’t get there without extensive practice and experience. Indeed, he wasn’t always as great a writer as he is now. (To be clear, I don’t know him personally, I’m going by what I’ve seen and read on his blog and in his books for the past 4 years.)

Summa Elvetica was, as far as I can tell, Vox’s first attempt at creating his own fictional fantasy world in the footsteps of J.R.R Tolkien (a.k.a. “The Master”). When Vox wrote SE, he was, by his own later admissions, trying to make a wider philosophical point using the old papal bull “Sublimus Dei” as his inspiration. And by his own admission, he did not succeed. That does not do anything to change the fact that SE is still highly entertaining and very much worth reading, though I maintain that it is best to read ATOB first. It just seems to make a lot more sense that way.

The book itself follows the quest of Marcus Valerius, one of the protagonists in Vox’s recent and awesome book, A Throne of Bones, as he travels with his dwarf, his body-slave, a military escort, and two high-ranking members of the great city of Amorr’s church on an ambassadorial mission to the kingdom of Elebrion, to determine whether the Elves have souls. The stakes are high: the Elves possess immense magical skill and would be terrible opponents against Amorr’s highly disciplined legions, particularly given that Amorr’s rulers have forsworn the use of all magic. The weight of the world is on Marcus’s shoulders; if he decides that Elves do not have souls, then the Church of Amorr will sanction open war against them. The cost in blood would be terrible. And if he decides that they do have souls, well, what then? Would the Church be required to accommodate a race whose cruelty and decadence are as great as its wisdom, in direct contravention of the teachings of the Immaculate?

To be honest, when I first started on this book, I put it down about a third of the way through. I only picked it up again after reading A Throne of Bones and getting about 60% of the way through that. When I first stopped reading SE, it was because I just couldn’t see where the story was going. When I read ATOB, it immediately became clear that I was missing rather a lot of Clericus’s back-story, and what a back-story that turned out to be.

Quite apart from the wider philosophical points about the nature of the soul and the redemption that can be found through the grace of God, SE is just an entertaining book to read. Marcus is easy to relate to; he’s a young guy with great talent, being thrust into a situation where he fears he is in way over his head. The side stories in the book are entertaining too; the dwarf Lodi’s tale about the Siege of the Iron Mountain is very well done, and it’s quite clear that Vox knows his Tolkien. The antipathy held between Elves and Dwarves in SE springs out of an interesting take on a similar episode in The Master’s legendarium.

Let’s not ignore the philosophy either- the way that Vox makes his points shows that he knows exactly what he’s talking about. His questions about the nature of the soul are powerful and profound. His method of re-wording the ancient Papal Bull into a verdict on the Elves is most impressive. For those who aren’t aware, Sublimus Dei was issued by the Pope in the 16th Century in response to the depredations of Spanish conquistadores, to make it perfectly clear to them that the Church considered the natives of South America to be human, with human souls, and therefore rendered them illegitimate targets for conquest, rape, and enslavement. Until that point, the Spanish had thought of the natives as subhuman- literally- and inflicted all of the horrors of ethnic cleansing upon them. This episode in the Church’s history is almost always overlooked by its legions of critics, who cannot understand that the Church has largely been a force for great good in the course of its long existence. So it is in Vox’s story- the Church is not an antagonist, and though it is flawed, it is also a moral beacon for the rest of Amorr and indeed all of Selenoth.

The subtleties of Selenoth are easy to appreciate. Here is a world that is at once strange and believable, just like Middle-Earth, though smaller in scope and scale (at least as far as I can tell). It’s not quite as… varied as George R.R. Martin’s Westeros, but then Martin was aiming for something quite different in ASOIAF. Vox’s take on the Elves is particularly good, I think; unlike The Master’s Elves, who are both virtuous and powerful (the Sons of Feanor being notable exceptions), Vox’s Elves are immensely powerful and equally decadent. Their morality has decayed to the point where Marcus has to ask himself some very difficult questions about whether they can truly be considered to have souls. It is only his meeting with the Lady Caitlys Shadowsong (I’m guessing- and this is only speculation- that Vox used his wife, Spacebunny, as a template for this particular Elfess) and the ancient and immensely powerful converted Elf Bessarias that really convince him of the rightness of his final decision. Really, not a bad way to go about things; I’ve seen far worse in high fantasy and space-opera literature in my time.

There are plenty of weaknesses, though. The ending feels rushed and forced; you go through an entire book of twists and turns and then somehow everything gets neatly resolved as a fait accompli in like 15 pages. The manner in which the Holy Father comes to his conclusions about Elves would sound ridiculous in the hands of a lesser author; it’s only Vox’s consummate skill in making a deep philosophical point in an entertaining fashion that saves the literary device used there. Everything just seems too… contrived somehow at the end. I suspect this is because Vox realised that he was getting too tied up in the philosophy to tell a good story and sort of pulled the rip-cord at a late stage in the process.

Also, it’s clear that Vox’s story-telling abilities still aren’t quite at their peak in this book. He’s good, no question about it, but the gap in quality between SE and ATOB is huge. It’s to Vox’s great credit that he filled it as quickly as he did; most writers (E.L. James, for instance, and her risible “work”) never progress beyond the mediocre or the downright awful.

Overall, I strongly recommend this book, if only because it ties up a lot of loose ends and open questions that one might have from reading ATOB on its own.

Verdict: 3/5- great premise, flawed execution