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I decided to take one for the team and read and review a book by Vox Day. So here it is, a review of "Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy".
****SPOILERS – IF THAT BOTHERS YOU, DO NOT READ****
There’s a (probably apocryphal) story about a person who is driving through Ireland, and they get lost. They stop to ask directions of a bloke standing at the side of the road. The conversation goes something like this, Driver: “Can you tell me how to get to Cork?” Bloke: “Cork, you say?” Driver: “Yes, Cork.” Bloke: “Well, I wouldn’t start from here…”
That’s pretty much how I felt after reading “Summa Elvetica”. There was the bones of a good book albeit disarticulated; it was an interesting idea, but I wouldn’t have started from here and I wasn’t quite sure why the author had.
My first problem was with the lead character. While I didn’t dislike Marcus Valerius, nor did I like him, particularly. He was pleasant enough in himself; I couldn’t imagine him giving a denarius to a beggar, but then I couldn’t imagine him picking his nose, either, let alone having any more interesting bad habits. He didn’t make mistakes, but then he didn’t do much of anything – it seemed to me that he let events roll over him.
Worst of all, he didn’t seem to be a good observer of his surroundings. To use an example of a character most fantasy readers have at least heard of, let’s take Harry Potter. Harry as portrayed by Rowling is an ordinary boy (well, as ordinary as a boy who has wizarding powers can be) but he’s a keen observer of the world around him. His problem (though it’s what makes him interesting) is that he has a habit of drawing the wrong conclusions about what he’s seen and then acting on his assumptions.
So given that Marcus Valerius wouldn’t know a plot against him or the city state of Amorr if he fell over it, he’s a bit hampered. He is told quite early on in the story that he may be going into danger, as if that wasn’t patently obvious from the start, but it doesn’t seem to bother him in any way. The blurb for the book says that Marcus is ‘talented, fearless and devout’, but we are never given any examples of what talents he has, his fearlessness seems to be more a lack of imagination and we’re never shown that he’s devout. I don’t remember a single instance in the book when he prays, and he seems to have no inner life to speak of.
This being the case, and the Sanctiff must have been aware of his shortcomings, I couldn’t work out why Marcus had been chosen for this important trip. I could have understood it if he’d been sent along as bag-carrier for one of the bishops, but from the scene with the Sanctiff he was supposed to be important in and of himself. It didn’t make sense.
In fact, things that didn’t make sense abounded in this book. The city-state of Amorr is obviously cod-Rome, as if the writer couldn’t create his own city, or perhaps he was in such a hurry to get the book written that he couldn’t be bothered. The Holy Writ that may (or may not) apply to the elves is obviously the bible, right down the references and quotes (there’s a section of Ezekiel 28 which has been lifted straight out, and just has an odd extra line attached) and actual people and places from human history are referenced – Aristotle, for example, and Sidon. This makes me wonder what else remained the same – did Aristotle tutor Alexander the Great? What about Plato and Socrates? Did they exist? And yet the dates don’t work, and there’s no attempt to explain why and how. It’s just so…lazy.
The book is derivative in other ways which I found gave me an itchy sense of wrongness. The dwarf halls as described by Lodi, Marcus’ dwarf bodyguard, seemed to owe more to the “Dragon Age” series of computer games than anything else. There didn’t seem to have been any attempt to make them original. More effort had been made with the elven city of Elberion (I would think it had to be, I gather that the Tolkien estate can be litigious) but even here the world building was tissue-thin.
OK, to explain. There are, as far as I’m aware, two main schools of thought with elves; there are the Tolkien-wafty living-on-air-and-iron-filings elves* and the dangerous-bastard pull-your-arms-off-while-laughing-merrily Child ballad/border ballad elves. I wasn’t quite clear if/whether the writer had made a decision which type he was going for, or if he’d decided to combine the two, making a mishmash which needed explaining. If so, it wasn’t explained.
A further thing needing explaining included why Marcus’s slave was eating dinner with his betters in the scene where the elven king held the welcoming feast. Surely he should have been serving the dinner, not eating it? And why was he (and Lodi) sharing his master’s room? Didn’t the elves have slave quarters? Didn’t they have slaves? If not, why not?
Then the denouement of the plot. Rather than finding out about the plot himself and doing something about it, which would have been satisfying, Marcus is rescued by an elf-maiden and then told about it. Not remotely satisfying for the reader. (It was like those pulp novels of the 1930s, “With one bound, Jack was free from his bonds…”) Then he jumps to the conclusion that not one, not two, not five but all of the twenty Michealine priest-soldiers who have been sent with them are involved in the plot. It wasn’t clear to me on what basis he made this mental jump.
It made no sense. I could suspend my disbelief if it were one or two, but all twenty? And they’d hidden it for over a month? All twenty of them? No, sorry. The elastic suspending my disbelief just snapped and hit me in the face with a nasty ‘twang’. I could never quite accept in Rowling’s book that one person had impersonated another for a whole year and never been spotted by anyone, and this stretched credulity even further than that.
I don’t care how well trained they think they are, I cannot believe that not one of twenty mercenary soldiers pretending to be soldier priests wouldn’t forget themselves and swear for a whole month. I’ve known too many soldiers and “swear like a trooper” isn’t a cliché for nothing. Further, I can’t believe that not one of them had a secret stash of spirits, or that not one of them had any of the local equivalent of Bolivian marching powder or at least funny baccy secreted about their person. It’s just not realistic, people aren’t like that and soldiers certainly aren’t – they may dress alike, but they have personalities and weaknesses, they’re not clones. For twenty people to keep a conspiracy secret…no. I’ve worked on ‘secret’ projects where the team consisted of five people, and there was always a degree of information leakage, usually from the top.
Any credibility the book might have had as a narrative fell apart at that point and from then on I was reading to see what more could go wrong with it.
* I was never clear where Tolkien’s elves got their food from. They all seemed too full of themselves to farm (and in pre-industrial societies most people are involved in agriculture) and however deep your coffers they have to run out if you’re buying food with your money year after year. They could trade, but that never seemed a very good explanation.
****SPOILERS – IF THAT BOTHERS YOU, DO NOT READ****
There’s a (probably apocryphal) story about a person who is driving through Ireland, and they get lost. They stop to ask directions of a bloke standing at the side of the road. The conversation goes something like this, Driver: “Can you tell me how to get to Cork?” Bloke: “Cork, you say?” Driver: “Yes, Cork.” Bloke: “Well, I wouldn’t start from here…”
That’s pretty much how I felt after reading “Summa Elvetica”. There was the bones of a good book albeit disarticulated; it was an interesting idea, but I wouldn’t have started from here and I wasn’t quite sure why the author had.
My first problem was with the lead character. While I didn’t dislike Marcus Valerius, nor did I like him, particularly. He was pleasant enough in himself; I couldn’t imagine him giving a denarius to a beggar, but then I couldn’t imagine him picking his nose, either, let alone having any more interesting bad habits. He didn’t make mistakes, but then he didn’t do much of anything – it seemed to me that he let events roll over him.
Worst of all, he didn’t seem to be a good observer of his surroundings. To use an example of a character most fantasy readers have at least heard of, let’s take Harry Potter. Harry as portrayed by Rowling is an ordinary boy (well, as ordinary as a boy who has wizarding powers can be) but he’s a keen observer of the world around him. His problem (though it’s what makes him interesting) is that he has a habit of drawing the wrong conclusions about what he’s seen and then acting on his assumptions.
So given that Marcus Valerius wouldn’t know a plot against him or the city state of Amorr if he fell over it, he’s a bit hampered. He is told quite early on in the story that he may be going into danger, as if that wasn’t patently obvious from the start, but it doesn’t seem to bother him in any way. The blurb for the book says that Marcus is ‘talented, fearless and devout’, but we are never given any examples of what talents he has, his fearlessness seems to be more a lack of imagination and we’re never shown that he’s devout. I don’t remember a single instance in the book when he prays, and he seems to have no inner life to speak of.
This being the case, and the Sanctiff must have been aware of his shortcomings, I couldn’t work out why Marcus had been chosen for this important trip. I could have understood it if he’d been sent along as bag-carrier for one of the bishops, but from the scene with the Sanctiff he was supposed to be important in and of himself. It didn’t make sense.
In fact, things that didn’t make sense abounded in this book. The city-state of Amorr is obviously cod-Rome, as if the writer couldn’t create his own city, or perhaps he was in such a hurry to get the book written that he couldn’t be bothered. The Holy Writ that may (or may not) apply to the elves is obviously the bible, right down the references and quotes (there’s a section of Ezekiel 28 which has been lifted straight out, and just has an odd extra line attached) and actual people and places from human history are referenced – Aristotle, for example, and Sidon. This makes me wonder what else remained the same – did Aristotle tutor Alexander the Great? What about Plato and Socrates? Did they exist? And yet the dates don’t work, and there’s no attempt to explain why and how. It’s just so…lazy.
The book is derivative in other ways which I found gave me an itchy sense of wrongness. The dwarf halls as described by Lodi, Marcus’ dwarf bodyguard, seemed to owe more to the “Dragon Age” series of computer games than anything else. There didn’t seem to have been any attempt to make them original. More effort had been made with the elven city of Elberion (I would think it had to be, I gather that the Tolkien estate can be litigious) but even here the world building was tissue-thin.
OK, to explain. There are, as far as I’m aware, two main schools of thought with elves; there are the Tolkien-wafty living-on-air-and-iron-filings elves* and the dangerous-bastard pull-your-arms-off-while-laughing-merrily Child ballad/border ballad elves. I wasn’t quite clear if/whether the writer had made a decision which type he was going for, or if he’d decided to combine the two, making a mishmash which needed explaining. If so, it wasn’t explained.
A further thing needing explaining included why Marcus’s slave was eating dinner with his betters in the scene where the elven king held the welcoming feast. Surely he should have been serving the dinner, not eating it? And why was he (and Lodi) sharing his master’s room? Didn’t the elves have slave quarters? Didn’t they have slaves? If not, why not?
Then the denouement of the plot. Rather than finding out about the plot himself and doing something about it, which would have been satisfying, Marcus is rescued by an elf-maiden and then told about it. Not remotely satisfying for the reader. (It was like those pulp novels of the 1930s, “With one bound, Jack was free from his bonds…”) Then he jumps to the conclusion that not one, not two, not five but all of the twenty Michealine priest-soldiers who have been sent with them are involved in the plot. It wasn’t clear to me on what basis he made this mental jump.
It made no sense. I could suspend my disbelief if it were one or two, but all twenty? And they’d hidden it for over a month? All twenty of them? No, sorry. The elastic suspending my disbelief just snapped and hit me in the face with a nasty ‘twang’. I could never quite accept in Rowling’s book that one person had impersonated another for a whole year and never been spotted by anyone, and this stretched credulity even further than that.
I don’t care how well trained they think they are, I cannot believe that not one of twenty mercenary soldiers pretending to be soldier priests wouldn’t forget themselves and swear for a whole month. I’ve known too many soldiers and “swear like a trooper” isn’t a cliché for nothing. Further, I can’t believe that not one of them had a secret stash of spirits, or that not one of them had any of the local equivalent of Bolivian marching powder or at least funny baccy secreted about their person. It’s just not realistic, people aren’t like that and soldiers certainly aren’t – they may dress alike, but they have personalities and weaknesses, they’re not clones. For twenty people to keep a conspiracy secret…no. I’ve worked on ‘secret’ projects where the team consisted of five people, and there was always a degree of information leakage, usually from the top.
Any credibility the book might have had as a narrative fell apart at that point and from then on I was reading to see what more could go wrong with it.
* I was never clear where Tolkien’s elves got their food from. They all seemed too full of themselves to farm (and in pre-industrial societies most people are involved in agriculture) and however deep your coffers they have to run out if you’re buying food with your money year after year. They could trade, but that never seemed a very good explanation.
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