Review of The Will of the Many by James Islington

This was very nearly a five-star book for me right until the end. Read on to find out why it was not! I don’t remember how I learned about The Will of the Many, but it has been on my to-read list for a bit, and I was craving a very classical epic fantasy story, and my library had it available, so here we are. I was very nervous going in—male author, male protagonist, set in a fantasy analogue of the Roman Republic were all pink flags that this book could go terribly wrong. Fortunately, this is one of those situations where I am very happy to be wrong. James Islington tells a great story and while, yes, I have some reservations about his characterization, he is a pretty strong writer overall. This is good fantasy.

Vis grew up as a prince on the island nation of Suus. When the Catenan Republic—or the Hierarchy, as he calls them—invades and takes over the place, Vis finds himself adrift, his family killed, his life in pieces. He has survived to seventeen as an anonymous orphan. Most notably, he has managed to avoid ceding Will, a force that people can transfer to their betters, who in turn channel it to their betters, in a literal pyramid scheme of willpower. The Republic runs on Will; how much of it you cede and how many cede to you is the true measure of status in this society. At the start of the story, Vis has an unlikely meeting with a senator and Quartus (who therefore receives the Will of hundreds of people) who wants to adopt him and send him to the elite Academy where he can be a spy. It’s a wild scheme, and Vis himself acknowledges this while also accepting, and we’re off to the races as Vis uncovers shadowy plots within plots—rebels and traitors and mysterious ruins that will probably kill you.

As a first-person narrator, Vis provides an extremely biased view of the Hierarchy. Islington does a creditable job of showcasing other interpretations, from the Catenans like Ulciscor to the other foreign-born Academy students like Eidhin. We get a very rich portrayal of the complexities of an imperial republic, and while I am not fool enough to believe it accurately captures what life in the actual Roman Republic was like, I think it’s a pretty good analog in terms of the seductive and coercive power structures at play in these kinds of societies. Vis himself grapples with how far to assimilate as he literally plays at becoming the golden child of the Republic, and the moments where people like Eidhin call him out on it are some of the most real and charged in the entire book. So while we are obviously meant to sympathize with Vis and condemn the Hierarchy for its expansionism and its vampirism of people’s Will (because that is what it is, a form of vampirism), we also get a good idea of why so many others are happy to exist within this fascist system.

Vis is an interesting-enough protagonist. I like that he’s a prince-in-exile yet this story is not one of him gathering enough followers to mount a rebellion (at least not yet). Indeed, his antagonistic relationship with some people who know him from his previous life is a nice additional layer of friction. Vis’s position, his vulnerability to being manipulated and used by these various characters, makes a lot of sense given how Islington has set up the Republic. I also like that Vis is not, at first, all that invested in Ulciscor’s mission and the true purpose of the ruins on Solivagus. He’s just half-heartedly following along because it’s his end of a bargain. Although Vis has heroic qualities, he isn’t setting out to make himself a hero, and that is rather endearing.

Unfortunately, The Will of the Many suffers from that most common malady of first-person narration: any character who isn’t Vis feels like an NPC. Ulciscor, Callidus, and Eidhin come close to escaping this fate, for we learn a lot about their backstories and motives that make them feel more real. The problem is really pronounced for the female characters, including the love interest. I don’t think it’s an issue with how Islington writes women so much as how Islington writes people who aren’t the viewpoint character. Whatever the cause, the end result is the same.

Yet even that might not have been enough to knock a star off this book’s rating, oh no. No, what brought this book down to four stars was the ending. Without spoiling it, the book ends by dropping a massive cliffhanger reveal on us. To be fair, it is a very effective way to get you excited to read the next book, and Islington does spend time foreshadowing some of the reveal earlier in the story. I also like the nature of the reveal, which unlocks an entirely new layer of speculative shenanigans to this series.

When I go back and reevaluate the book in light of what I know at the end, however, I start to see some of the holes. In attempting to leave us with a lot of mysteries, Islington doesn’t answer enough of our questions to get me truly invested in what’s happening. It’s clear that Vis—and Veridius and the rest of Religion, it seems—has stumbled upon something that could be an existential threat to the Catenan Republic. I don’t mind waiting until Book 2 to find out more about how Vis handles this, but I would have liked a better sense of what that threat is and how it connects to this vague concept of Will.

So that’s it then. The Will of the Many is an exquisite and entertaining story of fantasy-Roman politics and a young man coming of age under an occupying power. It has a meh romance, some great action, and some genuinely surprising twists. The magic/mythology is underdeveloped, cookiecutter and generic at points and too vague or poorly explored at others, and that rankles. Nevertheless, I am going to grab Book 2 sooner rather than later, because I loved this.