The Will of the Many
I was recently struck by my roughly twice-annual urge to read a big thick fantasy/SF tome, and once again the Kindle daily deal section meant that I already had something sitting in my library waiting for me: James Islington’s The Will of the Many, the first book in a planned quartet. At 774 pages in its printed form it’s not quite a top-tier chunker, but it was still girthy enough to satisfy my desires as it penetrated my… brain. Or whatever.
This metaphor is getting away from me.
The book is set in a fantasy world dominated by the Catanen Republic, AKA the Hierarchy, an empire based heavily on ancient Rome (of course) whose social structure revolves around the ceding and receiving of Will, which is kind of like your life essence crossed with the Force. Those on the lowest rung of the eight-level class system give up their will while receiving none in return and so live their lives in a semi-exhausted stupor, those at the highest level possess superhuman physical powers and can also learn to use Will as, essentially, magic. Will-powered devices have also allowed the Hierarchy to make all sorts of technological leaps ahead of their competition, which is one incentive they use to entice other cultures to join them (the other incentive is invasion).
Our protagonist, Vis, used to be the prince of Suus, one of the last parts of the world not conquered or absorbed into the Republic. But all that changed when the Fire Nation attacked the Hierarchy invaded, killing Vis’s family and leaving him penniless and on the run. Mercifully, the book skips past his years of destitution on the streets and we catch up with him as he’s living in an abusive orphanage and anxiously counting down the days to his eighteenth birthday, when he’ll be legally required to start ceding Will to the upper classes. When a powerful nobleman named Magnus Quintus Ulciscor visits the prison Vis is working at part-time, this opens up an exciting new opportunity, as Ulciscor is looking for a promising youth he can adopt and then send to the Catenan Academy in order to investigate political skull-duggery going on there; if Vis accepts the deal and manages to attain a high enough ranking during his time at the Academy, he’ll have his choice of government positions afterwards, including those that would render him immune from the requirement to cede Will.
Things get more complicated when Vis and Ulciscor are waylaid by a violent rebel group called the Anguis, who also want Vis in the Academy for their own reasons. Thus, Vis finds himself having to serve two mutually opposed masters, both of whom will kill him if he disobeys them or fails in the missions they’ve assigned him, while also keeping his true identity a secret. Sounds like a recipe for excitement!
But also lots of petty teenage drama, because as you might have guessed from the main character’s age and the fact that it’s mostly set in Fantasy High School, this is another one of those YA-but-not-YA books I’ve been so frustrated with recently. Accordingly, while it features plenty of gruesome violence, the book contains no swearing or sexual content of any kind. Really makes the gritty, cut-throat political setting come to life, let me tell you.
The first quarter or so of The Will Of The Many was a bit of a slog. Vis getting recruited by Ulciscor is wrapped up fairly quickly, and as I mentioned earlier we thankfully skip over his time on the streets (his entire backstory is, refreshingly, delivered almost entirely through brief asides peppered throughout the book; I kept waiting for the narrative to screech to a grinding halt for a long flashback, but that never happens), but the book’s pacing in the early going is oddly choppy.
After the Anguis attack, Vis wakes up in the Academy, literally face to face with the suspicious principle he’s been sent to spy on, which makes it seem like the book is going to jump straight into the action right then and there, but then Ulciscor immediately takes him back out to his estate on the mainland so he can undergo two months of training. The chapters covering that period are actually pretty critical to the plot, and fairly enjoyable to boot, but it’s still weird to have Vis right there where the plot is meant to be happening, only to say “actually just kidding, now we’re going to this other place instead.”
Another oddity of the book’s first quarter or so is the way it ends: with a wild, action-packed encounter between Vis and the Anguis leader that shakes the Hierarchy to its foundations and results in Vis semi-accidentally being crowned a hero of the Republic. It feels like something that should have been the climax to an entire novel… which, combined with the way Vis’s backstory is dealt with, kind of makes me wonder if it was originally the climax to an entire novel, and then James Islington decided to cut out most of it and use what was left as the beginning of this novel. If so, I think that was absolutely the right call (I would 100% not have finished the book if I had had to slog through Vis’s bereavement and time as a homeless urchin), but the excision definitely left some scar tissue behind. After these explosive, exciting events, Vis goes back to the Academy for real and immediately has to deal with school bullies and mean teachers, shit that could not possibly feel less important given that mere days ago he was surviving a horrific terrorist attack and confronting the Hierarchy’s greatest enemy.
The plot of Will of the Many gets interesting. Gripping, even. I galloped my way through vast chunks of its second half in single sessions. But before all of that, you have to deal with this bizarrely disjointed opening sequence, followed by chapter upon chapter of the most formulaic storytelling imaginable. Vis befriends a nerdy loner! The nerdy loner gets threatened by a mean jock, who Vis humiliates by being a tough cool guy! But then it turns out the mean jock was being put up to it and isn’t so mean after all! There’s a teacher who doesn’t like Vis (for reasons so inconsequential to the plot that I’ve already forgotten what they are), and a snooty rich kid who’s working with the teacher, who also doesn’t like Vis! They have a swordfight! There’s a popular girl who likes Vis because he’s so handsome and cool!
Just browsing through the Amazon deals section and looking at the back covers of books in shops, “protagonist of lowly station must infiltrate elite academy” seems to be a weirdly common plot structure at the moment, and I assume 99% of them contain the above tropes and scenes (possibly minus the swordfight, if the academy is like a boarding school in New Hampshire and not a castle full of werewolves or something). Even if you haven’t read any of those books, you’re going to anticipate every single story beat that happens in the school portion of the book, based solely on pop cultural osmosis.
Look, Vis is going into the cafeteria for the first time. What’s going to happen? Did you guess “he’s going to have to stand up to a bully?” Yeah, of fucking course he is, because this is American High School But Ancient Rome, and that’s what happens in American High School.
At times, the academy stuff goes out of its way to be less interesting. For example: the school has seven classes, but they’re not years that students progress through, since everyone joins at around 16 and a half and studies there until they turn eighteen (Vis is actually 17, but he’s lying about his age to try and dodge having to cede for a little longer). Instead, in a microcosm of the wider Hierarchy, they’re ranks that you progress through by merit and impressing the teachers, with each rank tackling harder material and also benefitting from more luxurious living quarters (if you’ve watched much anime in the last twenty years, this will be extremely familiar). The only way to move up a rank is to take someone else’s place.
So Vis rocks up and is at the lowest rung of Class 7. On his first day he discovers that the material the sevens are studying is way below his knowledge level and that no one else is bothering to try and answer questions out loud, so he impresses the teacher by raising his hand a lot and giving the right answer. I was convinced that the book would pull a switcheroo here—that there was a reason the other students were ignoring the teacher, and that Vis was walking into some sort of trap. This would knock him on his ass a little after everyone calling him a hero and result in him having to rethink his strategy.
But no. Vis really is just smarter and more engaged than the other students, and he gets promoted to Class 6 after his first day. Snooze.
To be fair, he does face challenges climbing up further ranks, but the ones that actually test him are the result of Academy staff being biased against him. When he’s competing on a fair playing field, he manages to just power through them by working hard and being clever. At no point did I feel any tension over whether he was going to be able to rank high enough by the end of his time in the Academy.
Especially since—just in case you’ve forgotten—while this is happening, he’s also doing spy shit for two different factions, one of them a terrorist organization, which are a) very dangerous on their own and which b) he will be killed or imprisoned if he fails to complete. It’s kind of hard to get too invested in the high school stuff when the B-plot is way more exciting and high stakes.
But still, Vis does go on those spy missions, and when he does, the excitement ramps up significantly. The more action-packed sections of the book are kind of like rollercoasters: you can see exactly where all the drops and loops are, but that doesn’t make it any less exciting when you get to them. The book has a real knack for setting up all of the things that could feasibly go wrong with Vis’s mission, then deploying them at just the right time for maximum tension.
Assuming you can work out what’s going on, that is. The fight scenes are described well and always easy to follow, but when Vis does other death-defying stuff involving his environment, I sometimes found myself struggling to visualise the scene as described. It seems like one of those situations where the author had a clear idea of what a particular location or invented bit of technology looked like, but forgot that the reader wouldn’t.
Outside of action scenes, the writing in the book is… “flavourless” is the word I’m going to go with. It does not delight my palate. It does not contain 11 secret herbs and spices. It did not at any point transport me to flavourtown. It gets the job done, but nothing more. Also, it’s one of those books that’s afraid to let a conversation go on for too long without some kind of physical action by the characters, so people are constantly sighing, frowning, or shrugging.
Another weird writing quirk that bugged me is that people will use the word “well” in dialogue as either a stand-alone sentence, or a sentence ender, as in this example:
And the way he won the Academy’s final test, the Iudicium… well. Two other students were killed. Accidents, supposedly.”
This happens often enough in the book’s second half that it started to seriously annoy me.
More like The Well of the Many, am I right?
Anyway, the book eventually wraps up with a hard break, resolving almost none of its dangling plot threads (and in fact keeps introducing new questions and mysteries right up until the last page). There’s an epilogue that suddenly and dramatically widens the scope of the book’s setting, in a way that I think it meant to be exciting but which just makes all the political wrangling over the Republic—aka the entire plot of the book—feel unimportant. When fantasy or SF series stop dead like this, I consider it a good sign when I want to immediately pick up the next instalment and keep reading.
That was not the case for The Will of the Many. I did enjoy my time with the book overall, but a combination of the plot leaving too much unresolved, that aforementioned sudden expansion in scope, and Vis’s post-Academy life just not sounding very compelling left me satisfied with what I’ve already read.
A big factor in this is Vis himself. The fact is, he’s just not a very interesting protagonist. In a story based around an unjust hierarchy, you would think that the bottom of the pyramid would be the natural place to find the protagonist, so it’s odd that Vis stands outside of the hierarchy due to his noble birth and the fact that he’s managed to avoid ceding Will. He isn’t striving to climb the ladder, he doesn’t want to dismantle the ladder since he considers that a lost cause. For most of the book he doesn’t even think that not ceding permanently is a realistic goal; he’s just trying to buy himself a few more years. All of this means that he’s completely detached from the primary political system that the plot is supposed to be about. This, combined with the way the story seems by the end of the book to be moving past the Republic and the Hierarchy as its central focus, really doesn’t put me in a rush to read more.