The Will of the Many, the Dislike of the One

Just because I hate it, does that actually mean it's bad?

When you hate something - especially something quite popular - it can be useful to sit down and contemplate why you hate it. It’s good to understand your own negative reaction, your biases, and what it’s doing that runs counter to what you like.

For example, I recently read The Will of the Many, a novel by James Islington. It’s somewhat well regarded, especially among the folks who rate such things at Goodreads - a site which has a multitude of issues but does have an extensive database and a handy way to keep track of what you might want to read in the future. I hate this book, but I find myself wondering if I’m not being fair to it.

If someone comes to me and says “I loved The Will of the Many” I won’t consider them wrong, even though I definitely disagree. If someone decided to make a Netflix limited series about the thing, I could see a lot of moments that would make for some nifty action sequences. My personal hatred for the book is not because it’s necessarily bad, but because it did a ton of stuff I didn’t like.

We will now be treading into spoiler territory.

I actually liked the world he created. A vaguely roman-inspired critique of capitalism - and, to an extent, multi-level marketing, of all things - it operates as the poorer people cede their “Will” to people who outrank them. Poor people have little energy and ambition, the rich are able to throw trees around. It’s an interesting contrast because it will constantly use that Will to do any number of cool things - power airships, create spy devices, give enhanced physical abilities - while always reminding the reader exactly what the cost is for these advancements. 

I initially liked the main character, an orphan from a dead royal family that works in a prison, battles in an underground fight club, and doesn’t participate in this Will business. Vis, as he’s named, at least showed potential, though as the narrator he could stand to describe people as grinning about 75% less.

This is what hooked me. It did a lot of things right in the first few pages. Then it revealed that the character would be going to a magical school, and at this point my heart sank. I would not like this book.

Why does a magic school kill a book for me? While it might not necessarily kill a story, what it usually does is put a barrier between the characters and more interesting things happening within the world, and it definitely does that here. While Vis is going to classes and negotiating with educators of varying levels of friendliness, we have a world beyond that has a bunch of interesting things happening that we don’t get to learn much about. We are suddenly stuck in high school cliques, the outcasts that are secretly cool and the cool kids who are secretly monsters. We are learning about the various arcane rules that govern the magical academy, which is inevitably a boarding school. Here, characters advance and get knocked out of classes in a way that doesn’t seem conducive to an effective - or, indeed, coherent - education. We learn about school sports that are inevitably extremely important for non-school reasons - here, a labyrinth race designed to help students run an important labyrinth in some ruins. 

What we aren’t doing is interacting with the interesting world the author has built. This is especially true here, as students aren’t actually allowed to use Will at all. Interesting characters are introduced and then booted to the sidelines, as the school consumes the attention of the hero - and thus the audience. Characters have to sneak out of school to actually accomplish anything, which makes it feel like the audience has to do that too. There’s a world of intrigue happening out there that we can’t take part in because we have to go to gym class.

This does everything you expect from a magic school narrative - it traps the hero within the walls and only gives him the briefest glimpses out to something that looks a lot more interesting. It creates a bunch of stock characters - the girlfriend, the quiet kid, the big kid who is smarter than he looks, the kids who clearly don’t like the hero, the mean teacher, the nice teacher that has something to hide - while a bunch of interesting characters exist outside. You know they’re there, you know they’re doing things, but you can’t actually see them.

For a massive chunk of the book, I just wanted to be let out of class, and free from the structure that it imposes on the reader. This is almost always what happens in a magic school story, and a reason why I’m typically not fond of them. I don’t want to be in school!

Later, it becomes a Hunger Games, which makes it worse.

What do I mean by a Hunger Games? While that series didn’t create the genre of “kids expected to do harm to each other,” and that premise can be used well - see Battle Royale and its anti-war, anti-authority incandescent rage - a Hunger Games is a specific kind of complaint, one which I had starting with the second Hunger Games novel Catching Fire. Like that book’s Hunger Games All Stars, it’s a battle that exists to force conflict instead of having conflict naturally arise during the narrative. It induces conflict among people who have no actual incentive to fight each other. Suddenly, we’re in the forest trying to collect a trinket to put in a statue, because that will upturn the relationships that have been developed in a sudden, arbitrary manner.

In The Will of the Many, the Hunger Games isn’t supposed to be fatal, at least. It winds up being extremely fatal, but it’s not supposed to be. But it’s a swerve that made me groan. It was done for narrative expediency - the author went through great pains to make a location hard to access for the majority of the novel, and having an outdoor competition was the only way he could dig himself out of that self-induced hole - and quickly killed off a ton of characters so we didn’t have to endure too much of it, but even in the brief time on the page my only thought was “are we seriously doing this?”

This novel is also part of a planned series - possibly a trilogy, it’s always a trilogy. One of the biggest dangers of a planned series is that you run the risk of not really having an ending - you know there’s going to be another 650 pages at your disposal, so you don’t actually have to finish anything. In this case, the book does at least end the school portion of the narrative, but it doesn’t end anything else. Many things are finished, but nothing is resolved. It’s still full of unknowns and central mysteries are left hanging. The knowledge that there’s going to be a sequel took away the desire to do a complete story.

This is something I find absolutely infuriating. In my opinion, a narrative work should behave as though that’s the only entry in the series. That means that the story is complete by the end, the parts left hanging raise new questions instead of preventing old ones from being answered. That doesn’t mean you can’t set up or tease a sequel, but instead that a reader can leave happy if a sequel doesn’t come to pass - if that’s the only book, movie, season of television, game or so on, you can still be happy you took it in. When you don’t do that, it feels like you just took in an advertisement for the next work, no matter how much the first entry in a series accomplishes.

There’s always the chance that you won’t get a sequel, after all. Even a multi-book deal can end if a Cybertruck drives into you.

There’s also another thing I didn’t like, but it wasn’t much to do with the overall structure and tropes of the novel. Instead, it’s the interplay between the status quo - known as The Hierarchy - and the group that wants to overthrow them - known as the Anguis. The Hierarchy is naturally an inherently evil empire, and I don’t have a problem with that, since it gives the hero something to rage against. Islington also manages to effectively demonstrate how stability can make people justify and endorse an unfair system, and how people who benefit from privilege are able to ignore the consequences of that privilege.

Now let’s talk about that revolutionary group.

The Anguis is likely meant to be at least a bit ambiguous, but they are just nakedly evil. They murder people constantly - it seems to be their go-to solution to any problem, the murders are constant and brutal. They rage against the machine while using every single tool the machine gives them, but they only use those tools to kill people. The intent was clearly to create a group that has a sympathetic goal but an approach to reaching that goal that makes the reader question them. Do the ends justify the means? Here, we have a group where the means are so aggressively deadly that you don’t want them to achieve their goal. Say what you will about the evil empire, but at least they’re not killing tens of thousands - including multiple children - for hypocritical reasons.

That said, there’s a twist late in the novel that suggests they’re friends with the evil empire anyway. So what’s the point of them to begin with? The conflict isn’t even real, no matter how many bodies line the streets. It’s one of those twists that exists to pull the rug out without actually having much thought beyond that - the motivations don’t square with the methods used, and it suggests a world where nobody knows what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, or whether there’s even an end goal.

But these are strictly my frustrations. Clearly, they don’t apply to everyone else. Other people absolutely love this thing. Does that mean they’re wrong? No, because these tropes don’t bother them at the same level they bother me - and they may actually like them. I want characters out in the world, not trapped within the walls of an institution. I want conflict to arise naturally because of the conflicting ideas and motivations of characters, rather than it being forced because of a game. I want a story to end before we move on to the next one. But that’s my style. As much as I hated the experience, I had to admit that the majority of that hatred was trying to work with something that’s simply not for me. There’s nothing wrong with something not being for me, and if I can’t enjoy it - and I definitely did not enjoy most of this book - that doesn’t mean it’s not perfect for someone else. 

Which leads me to the problem of a lot of criticism, which is that we are so laser-focused on whether or not something is good that we aren’t really considering that good means something different to different people. I hated this book, but is it bad? It’s definitely bad for me, it does a lot of things I hate, but it moves swiftly, has some interesting ideas, and has some generally decent moments. But it’s not like I can give it a star rating, as is demanded by Goodreads, since that star is filtered into the grand weighted average monster that gives the overall star average. I need to indicate that it’s not for me - I gave it one star just to ensure that the recommendation algorithm gets the message - but I don’t know if it’s necessarily that bad. 

But we spend a lot of time thinking about whether or not something is bad, which colors how we talk about things. Take the recent Jason Statham vehicle The Beekeeper. I enjoyed the movie immensely, I’m glad I watched it, and “I choose to bee” is a line that I quote more than is perhaps wise. Because of the way we’ve framed criticism, and how we’ve decided that there could even be a good or bad scale that works on anything resembling an objective level, any talk of The Beekeeper is going to be regarded as a “bad” movie. Star ratings and the idea of objective quality is that we keep thinking about good and bad, and whether or not something fits on an arbitrary scale.

That’s not framing that’s fair to art, but more importantly, it’s not fair to people who enjoy art. We’ve put “like” and “dislike” on a different scale from “good” and “bad,” and now it’s hard to have a discussion that doesn’t involve objective quality. It’s hard to divorce ourselves from those arbitrary scales, and the second scale doesn’t matter. I know I enjoyed The Beekeeper, I enjoyed ‘80s laser motorcycle thriller Cyclone, and that’s a relevant measure of quality, rather than the idea of whether or not anything is good or not.

And, in the end, that’s the tricky part of saying something’s good or bad. Is this a bad book? How can I know? The structure and tropes are something I’ve got a bias against in the first place, maybe it does everything very well for people who don’t have those problems.

That said, there is definitely art that is bad, art that is irredeemable, art that if someone says they like it I will judge them - harshly. I have a book in mind. I’ll talk about it next time.