As I said in my last post, the habit of reading was something I abandoned (cowardly) over the last 10 years. My relationship with literature was that of a compulsive hoarder, a first-rate spine collector (adj. said of someone who buys books for the hollow aesthetic pleasure of seeing them on a shelf), who came nowhere near diving into the pages of a good novel. I read several, yes, but short ones and with some specific interest, like the one used in my post Drinking poison to remain useful: abortion in the Far West, but it wasn’t literature for the simple pleasure of reading.
That lasted until June of this year, when I bought the Italian edition of The Will of the Many. At that point I had two self-imposed goals: to read a book of more than 500 pages and to read an entire book in Italian. The latter was the most paradoxical: I wasn’t even reading books in my native language, setting a goal in one specific language was ironic, but its very existence served as motivation.
And that was how, while looking for recent fantasy books, I came across The Will of the Many by James Islington. I’ve never been one to read the synopsis of any film or series, I like understanding what is happening as I experience the story and, my biggest criticism, a synopsis serves to throw away the pilot episode of a series, the first half hour of a film and the first 5 chapters of a book. So I basically bought this book based on the simple description “It’s like The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss, but with a world inspired by the Roman Empire”. Yes, that alone was enough for the book to catch my attention.
Now speaking about the book, it’s the first in a still-unfinished trilogy called Hierarchy. In The Will of the Many, the Empire of Hierarchy operates through a system called Will, in which most people surrender part of their strength, energy and mental capacity to those above them in society. Thus, the higher someone is in the hierarchy, the more powerful they become, because they receive the accumulated Will of many others. This structure sustains both the government and the inequality of the world: the poorest lose part of themselves to keep the elite strong, while institutions such as the Academy train young people to occupy positions of power. The story follows Vis, a young man who rejects this system, but needs to infiltrate it, entering the Academy and pretending loyalty while trying to uncover its secrets and preserve his own freedom.
The elite doesn’t have (only) money, political influence or surnames that open doors. It has, literally, the strength of those below. The energy that allows the most powerful to be faster, more intelligent and physically superior doesn’t come from any intrinsic quality, but from the Will surrendered by hundreds or thousands of people. Privilege stops being a sociological abstraction, an expression that appears in internet discussions and makes everyone immediately take a defensive position, and becomes something visible: those at the top are strong because those at the bottom have been weakened.
That’s the whole book, honestly. The rest is execution.
It’s a simple idea, almost obvious after someone writes it down, but its execution works extremely well. In our world, wealth doesn’t arise in a vacuum either. The free time of some depends on the labor of others, extraordinary success usually comes accompanied by an extraordinary structure and even the person who declares himself completely independent probably didn’t have to build the road he traveled on, install the plumbing in his house or produce the antibiotic he took at the age of seven. In The Will of the Many, Islington eliminates all these intermediate stages and reduces the relationship to its most brutal form: one person gives up part of themselves, another person receives that part and becomes more powerful.
Naturally, the Hierarchy explains this as a pact necessary for the maintenance of society. Will wouldn’t be stolen, but surrendered; it wouldn’t be exploitation, but collaboration; it wouldn’t be submission, but order. Every (minimally) lasting political system needs to create its own vocabulary to explain why some people should command and others obey. Calling a sacrifice a civic duty doesn’t make it stop being a sacrifice, but it helps a great deal in preventing the sacrificed person from asking inconvenient questions.
The Academy, where much of the story takes place, brings this contradiction into the educational sphere. In theory, it selects the best and is a place where the use of Will is absolutely forbidden. The students compete, are evaluated and must constantly prove that they deserve to advance. It seems like a meritocratic environment, at least until we remember that some arrive with important families, years of preparation, knowledge of the rules and connections capable of protecting them when those same rules become inconvenient. Everyone takes the same test, yes, but not everyone started the race at the same line.
This doesn’t mean that the privileged are necessarily incapable. This is a point that discussions about privilege often destroy before they even begin, as though recognizing a structural advantage were the same as denying any individual effort. Many of the Academy students are intelligent, disciplined and competent. The problem is that their virtues don’t exist in isolation from the conditions that allowed them to develop. A person can run very fast and still have started a hundred meters ahead. Recognizing this is natural.
Vis works as a good protagonist for this story because he doesn’t observe the system only from the outside. He needs to enter it, understand its rules and, at different moments, use the opportunities that the Hierarchy itself offers. His personal resistance isn’t that of the revolutionary who can remain morally pure on a distant mountain, writing manifestos and refusing any contact with society. It’s the more uncomfortable resistance of someone who needs to wear the uniform, attend classes, smile at the right people and pretend to want exactly what he despises.
There’s a question running through the book: to what extent is it possible to fight a system without being transformed by it? Climbing the hierarchy provides resources to confront it, but it also means receiving the benefits produced by its injustice. The Will that makes it possible to fight the powerful may be the same Will taken from those one intends to defend. It isn’t a particularly simple question.
The population itself doesn’t remain obedient only out of fear. The Hierarchy also offers the possibility of advancement. Perhaps you’re surrendering your Will today, but, if you’re competent, disciplined, obedient and have a statistically improbable amount of luck, you may receive the Will of others tomorrow. It’s an effective promise because it transforms the exploited into a prospective exploiter. Instead of asking why the pyramid exists, they start calculating how many steps they need to climb to stop being crushed by it.
In other words, like the real world.
This mechanism is probably the most familiar part of the entire fantasy world. We don’t have Will transferred through magical procedures, but we do have the hope that proximity to power is a better alternative than questioning it. The objective stops being the elimination of an unjust structure and becomes the conquest of a comfortable place within it. No one wants to destroy the table when they still believe that they may, someday, sit at its head.
The brilliance of the system created by Islington lies precisely in making physical a relationship that we can normally ignore. In the Hierarchy, it’s impossible to pretend that the concentration of power has no consequences for those at the bottom. When someone receives more Will, someone else is left with less. The eighth level of the pyramid, the lowest, consists of people who literally live with half of their vital energy. The gain on one side contains the loss on the other. There’s no magical wealth appearing out of nowhere, only a transfer organized and legitimized by the State.
Of course all of this could result in an unbearable book, one of those in which characters stop talking like human beings and start reciting the opinion of the author at twenty-page intervals. Fortunately, The Will of the Many isn’t that, it’s a fantasy story: there are mysteries, competitions, conspiracies, friendships, betrayals, inexplicable ruins and a quality of writing without equal. But holy fuck, this guy writes so, so well.
The political commentary doesn’t replace the narrative, but is born from it. There’s no need to interrupt the story to explain that the Hierarchy is unjust because its injustice is present in the everyday functioning of that world. It appears in the tired body of those who surrender, in the disproportionate strength of those who receive, in the rules of the Academy and in the ease with which intelligent characters defend a system that benefits them. The book trusts that the reader will notice the contradiction without the need for a character to point at it and say: “Look, this is a metaphor”.
I don’t know to what extent James Islington intended to write a direct critique of our concept of privilege. Authors also have the right to create magical empires without first filling out a form declaring their political-philosophical intentions. But intention may matter less than the result. By transforming inequality into a kind of human electrical current, the book forces the reader to face an uncomfortable question: how much of the Will of whoever is at the top truly belongs to them?
My experience with the book, however, wasn’t only intellectual. I had bought The Will of the Many to fulfill two arbitrary goals: to read more than 500 pages and finish a book in Italian. For a few weeks, I once again felt that childish need to finish a chapter and immediately start the next one, even though the clock had already passed the hour when any responsible person should have been doing anything else, like, I don’t know, sleeping.
Of course the central point of this article is how the book explains and uses privilege. But speaking of fantasy, it’s an excellent book. Well-written characters, with their own agendas, excellent pacing and unparalleled worldbuilding. I have a few criticisms (such as the protagonist being good at everything he does), but they don’t tarnish the greatness of this work.
I finished the more than 800 pages with the childish satisfaction of someone fulfilling a promise made to himself, but also with a new problem: the trilogy is still unfinished. I spent ten years avoiding books and, when I finally decide to come back, I choose precisely a series that forces me to wait. Well done, me. I’m already devouring the second book. But perhaps it’s a fair punishment when one of the reasons for reading something is “wow, it sounds like Patrick Rothfuss”, that is, a writer who left me hanging in a kind of sadistic literary ghosting.
That said: go fuck yourself, Patrick.
Congratulations, Islington.