Perhaps I am being uncharitable, but The Will of the Many by James Islington reads very much like a YA novel written for young men who think of the Roman Empire when they should be thinking about kissing pretty girls, handsome boys, or both. The setting is designed to evoke Rome; the Catenan Republic seems at least to have been researched so that Islington brings verisimilitude to his worldbuilding. The magic system is also both interesting and timely, it’s essentially a pyramid scheme, where the lowest classes cede half of their psychic strength (along with their strength and vitality) to somebody above them, who cedes half the power they draw in turn, and so on until the guy at the top is drawing on the combined strength of hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions.
Unfortunately, after 97 pages out of 640 I’m not sure that the first installment of Islington’s Hierarchy has much else going for it. As a protagonist, Vis Telimus doesn’t interest me much. Yes, somebody from the Catenan Republic murdered his family. He’s resigned to not getting direct payback, but is determined to resist the Republic by never ceding his will. He routinely beats up people who draw on other people’s will in illegal cage matches for extra money. He’s been adopted by a high-ranking Catenan official who wants to use him as a stalking horse at the Republic’s elite military academy.
That’s basically it for his characterization by the time I had decided to bring the novel back to the public library. His motivation seems thin enough to lend a typical shonen manga protagonist the illusion of depth. His emotional range seems almost a parody of stereotypical young masculinity. And perhaps there are reasons for that that become clear later on. However, I have untouched other books in my stack that I could be reading instead. Islington simply does not offer me sufficient reason to care about Vis or his struggles by the time I gave up. Maybe the timing was off, or maybe I’m just not in the mood for what was not merely a slow burn, but a glacial one.
It’s not a bad novel. I simply can’t help but think that Pierce Brown had done it better in Red Rising. And, frankly, Alfred Bester did it much better back in the 1950s in The Stars My Destination; Vis is no Gully Foyle, let alone Edmond Dantès. What do I care that Vis is a deposed prince? After all, I work for a living, and I could re-read Moorcock’s Hawkmoon novels again if I wanted to read about a dispossessed nobleman taking on an empire.
I have also been reading Babel; or, The Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History by R. F. Kuang, which also deals with colonialism and features as its protagonist an outsider at that most rarified of elite academic settings: Oxford.
Furthermore, Ms. Kuang’s The Poppy War — which I had read a year or two ago — also centered upon an outsider among the elite in a military acadamy, and felt meatier because she had been drawing upon real-world Chinese history, particularly the Sino-Japanese War and the Opium Wars with the Dark Empire of Granbretan Great Britain.
Maybe I would have eaten up The Will of the Many had it come out 30 years ago. And maybe I should have tried to slog through another 100-150 pages or so, in case the story got rolling and the characterization improved once the academy arc began? But then I opened my copy of Jade City by Fonda Lee, see just how much she had going on by page 97, and recall that there are reasons that Ms. Lee won the World Fantasy Award for this novel in 2018.
No. I am under no obligation to be ‘fair’ when reading for pleasure, after all. I don’t actually need a reason or a justification to put aside a book that cannot hold my interest. Islington wasn’t delivering on plot or characterization, and the writing wasn’t rich enough to tide me over until the plot thickened and the characterization deepened. So, back to the public library it goes, where it might get borrowed by somebody better able to appreciate it. And if it hasn’t been sold, I might pick it up again when I’ve reduced my pile of unread books.
His upcoming cyberpunk outing, Scion, might be more to my taste: though it might not compare favorably to Fonda Lee’s The Last Contract of Isako, let alone Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan. Maybe we’ll see...