Review: The Will of the Many by James Islington

A fair system only works if there’s an unbiased means of assessing merit. When there is no pride or selfishness involved.

page 280, The Will of the Many by James Islington

Preamble

When I wrote the review for Katabasis last week, I thought it was the last book I’d read this month, or at least the last book I’d review this month. Alas, the hold system at my library had different plans. Before my scheduled suspension of library holds kicked in, this particular doorstopper of a book arrived. At first I did not want to read this book until after I had gotten back from my vacation. However I had nothing else going on this past Sunday so I decided I might as well read it and here we are.

The Will of the Many has been in my to-be-read pile for a while and I have heard generally good things about it from the booktubers I follow who read epic fantasy. The book is popular enough that even two years after its release, there are hundreds of holds on it and it took months for my hold to arrive.

Without further ado, let’s get into it.

The Book

The Will of the Many is a epic fantasy novel that is heavily inspired by the Ancient Roman empire. That is one of those things that at first put me off from reading the book. I don’t know about you but these days I find media heavily inspired by the Ancient Romans to just be kind of cringe. The Ancient Roman empire gets mythologized by the worst kind of people in our current times and as such I find that it has way too many negative connotations for me to take seriously.

I’ll give this book some credit, it goes all the way in and commits to the Ancient Roman empire vibes. Character names are appropriately Roman, the fantasy government is structured as a republic with senators, the ranking system uses Latin words, we get mentions of Praetorians, hell even the chapter numbers are in Roman numerals. That last one while cute, make the later chapter numbers unreadable to me. I respect the commitment to the theme, but just use normal numbers for your chapters please.

At the core of the fantasy world is the Hierarchy aka the Catenan Empire which operates on a hierarchical system of Will where a person cedes strength, drive, and focus to people higher up in the Hierarchy. The people at the bottom, the Octavii don’t receive will from anyone and the people at the top, the Princeps each receive Will from 40,320 people – essentially forming a hierarchical pyramid of power. Will is the magic system in this fantasy world. Calling your fantasy magic system Will is a little on the nose but overall I found the actual system to be novel enough to be intriguing.

The book is told from the perspective of our main character – Vis Telimus, an orphan who is adapted by a member of the Senate named Ulciscor in an effort to infiltrate the Catenan Academy, a elite academy where the Empire’s young elite talent is trained in the use of Will. Wait is this another dark academia story? In some ways, yes. Majority of the book involves Vis’ interactions with his school mates and his teachers at the academy and coming hot off the heels of Katabasis means that the dark academia aspects of this book aren’t all that compelling.

Vis as a character is…fine. He gets a significant amount of character development and the book spends quite a bit of a time at the beginning of the book building him up as a character. Ultimately however, I didn’t end up feeling particularly attached to Vis. I found myself more interested in the other characters and the mystery at the heart of the book than Vis himself.

Thematically, this book attempts to discuss the nature of a colonizing force like the Catenan Empire and way it uses its various systems (namely Will) to enforce its cultural hegemony and extract resources from its subjects. The book also briefly addresses the various contradictions at the heart of a system that purports to be a meritocracy while favouring those who already have power and privilege to gain more power and privilege.

These thematic explorations weren’t anything novel or impressive, if anything they feel a bit shallow. Very much giving off baby’s first exploration about the use of violence within anti-colonial movements. I think other fantasy books like Blood Over Bright Haven or Babel addressed colonization and related topics in a much more nuanced and effective way.

Conclusions

Overall, I think The Will of the Many is an above average epic fantasy novel. There is an interesting fantasy world with complex characters with a lot of mystery, intrigue and politicking. The writing style is inoffensive and the book makes good use of its 630 pages. There is nothing about it I particularly dislike but there isn’t anything about it that stands out either. This is another case of “it’s fine”.

There is a sequel to this book coming out in November of this year. The ending of this book didn’t give me much motivation to find out more about the mystery so I don’t think I’ll get to the sequel until sometime next time if ever. It’ll be something I’ll keep in the back of my mind for weeks when I have nothing else that I want to read.

That’s all from me this time. See y’all in the next one whenever that is.

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