Babel - R.F. Kuang
- Publisher ā Harper Voyager
- Published ā Out now
- Price ā Ā£9.99 paperback | Ā£5.99 Kindle
A couple of years ago I got deep into Booktok, and I read a lot of ādark academiaā novels that became popular on that platform. I realised quite quickly that I wasnāt really enjoying many of the books I was being recommended, and I also stopped using TikTok quite so much, and so I havenāt really engaged with that platform in a while. Right as I was disconnecting from those spaces R.F. Kuangās Babel, or the Necessity of Violence was becoming popular and I sort of dismissed it as yet another BookTok trend that I wasnāt particularly interested in. Since then, though, people I know have told me that they think Iād enjoy it, and reading The Skin and Its Girl recently, which references the tower of Babel quite regularly, brought it back into the forefront of my mind. I figured it was time to finally sit down with it and see what all the fuss is about.
Hereās the synopsis:
Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.
- Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day heāll enroll in Oxford Universityās prestigious Royal Institute of Translationāalso known as Babel. The tower and its students are the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver-workingāthe art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver barsāhas made the British unparalleled in power, as the arcane craft serves the Empire's quest for colonization.
For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to stopping imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide . . .
Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence?
Babel opens with an authorās note titled āAuthorās Note on Her Representations of Historical England, and of the University of Oxford in Particularā, in which Kuang speaks directly to people who would approach the book in bad faith or quibble about the āhistorical accuracyā in this fantasy novel. It opens with the following passage:
The trouble with writing an Oxford novel is that anyone who has spent time at Oxford will scrutinize your text to determine if your representation of Oxford aligns with their own memories of the place. Worse if you are an American writing about Oxford, for what do Americans know about anything? I offer my defence here:
Kuang follows this by talking about some of the changes she has made to the real Oxford in her presentation of it in the novel, as well as by citing several sources. She ends by telling us that if we āfind any other inconsistencies, feel free to remind yourself that this is a work of fictionā.
My immediate reaction to this introduction was that it felt very strange and overly defensive in a sort of hostile way. As someone whoās spent many, many years dealing with Twitter users who think they know better than everyone around them about literally every topic, it read like it was written by someone who has also spent far too much time on social media and has been trained to account for bad faith reads every time they open their mouths. My longer-term reaction, somewhat perversely, was that going into the book with this assumption of bad faith actually made me want to read it more critically than I might otherwise have done. And thatās a shame, because largely I really enjoyed Babel and that experience was slightly marred by my sudden urge to check facts and to wonder whether this thing was accurate or not. I donāt think I would have had that experience had I not first read the authorās introduction, and I honestly wish Iād skipped it on my initial read.
My main complaint about Babel is that I donāt think it goes far enough. In the two years since it was published itās garnered a lot of attention online from (mostly) white people who seem upset about the way it portrays the colonial attitudes of the British empire. Looking at the one-star reviews of this book on Goodreads is to look into a world where people are deeply, personally offended by white English people being the villains of a novel about the British empire and the beginnings of the Opium Wars. And yet when I actually read the book I found that itās not particularly inflammatory at all. The white English people who serve as the villains arenāt portrayed particularly unfairly, and theyāre not cartoon villains. If anything, the people who are portrayed cartoonishly or with simplistic motivations are the members of the Hermes Society who donāt seem to have any real understanding of how to make revolutionary action actually work.
Part of where I donāt think the book goes far enough is in its attitude to class, and one of the best examples of this is, I think, in how Kuang talks about food. Food is mentioned quite often in the novel, with characters regularly lamenting how bland and unseasoned British food is. Kuang writes:
The English made regular use of only two flavours ā salty and not salty ā and did not seem to recognize any of the others. For a country that profited so well from trading in spices, its citizens were violently averse to actually using them; in all his time in Hampstead, he never tasted a dish that could be properly described as āseasonedā, let alone āspicyā.
This in itself is a very āAmerican on Twitterā way of talking about British food, frankly, but it also betrays a lack of understanding - or at least a lack of interest - in the way this lack of seasoning is integrated into ideas of class. The fact of the matter is that when spices were still expensive and exclusive to the upper classes, the British did season their food. Once spices began to be more commonly available - a direct result of the colonialist extraction thatās at the heart of the novel - the British upper classes began to shun them as being common. This is when we begin to see the ātheory of tasteā begin to emerge, in which the upper classes decided that things should ātaste like themselvesā rather than being infused with spices. I had wondered if this was the sort of information that might show up in a footnote, since it feels directly relevant to the novelās main thesis, but apparently not.
Something Iāve heard from many people about this novel is that itās in conversation with Susanna Clarkeās Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which is one of my favourite books. On the surface that appears to be true. Itās set at roughly the same time period (give or take twenty years), itās an alternate history in which the British Empire reinforces their power with magic, and it contains footnotes. But that is honestly where the similarities end, and itās also part of what makes me wish the book went a little further. Norrell is absolutely riddled with footnotes, you can barely turn the page without seeing a new one, and theyāre all in-world. They all serve to further every single theme in the book, and do a lot of world-building that makes Clarkeās vision of a magically-enhanced Empire seem real.
In comparison Babelās footnotes feel very thin on the ground. I wanted the book to be dense with references and supplementary material, but they donāt show up anywhere near as frequently as they could do. And when they do thereās a split between footnotes that talk about fictional in-universe matters, and footnotes that make reference to the actual truth of the matter. Iām not opposed to the latter, especially in a book thatās overtly concerned with social commentary - the footnotes in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyahās Chain-Gang All-Stars are breathtaking and stuck with me long after Iād forgotten the events of the book, for example. But many of Kuangās footnotes simply serve to point out where the author is being particularly clever, or to drive home a point that was already very clear on the page. Many times when I read them I was reminded of the authorās introduction, and I couldnāt help coming away with the sense that many of the footnotes exist because Kuang doesnāt trust her readers. And thatās a shame.
Interestingly, rather than being in conversation with Norrell I often felt that Babel was more in conversation with - or had more in common with - the Harry Potter books, to the extent that some parts of the novel actually read like they could have come from fanfic. (This is not, to be clear, an inherently bad thing, and this isnāt a criticism. Very well-written fic exists and I have read a lot of it). When you set a novel in a pseudo-Victorian magical boarding school you will obviously always draw comparisons to the wizard books, but here the similarities go beyond the surface, from the broad to the specific. Our protagonist is an orphan plucked from a life of, if not poverty, then hardship, at the age of 11 to enter a world beyond his wildest imagination, where heās told that magic exists and that he may one day learn how to use it. He spends his days at an expensive school where he never has to want for anything and never questions where his money comes from. Our protagonists steal food from the kitchens.
There are even elements that feel like references, like Robin living at number 4 Magpie Lane rather than number 4 Privet Drive, or a teacher being named Professor Felton (potentially named for Tom Felton, who played Potter fanfic authorsā perennial favourite bad boy, Draco Malfoy). At one point the protagonists plan to climb to the top of the tower to look at stars through the telescopes there, which a footnote tells us only exist because āIn the mid-eighteenth century, Babel scholars were briefly seized by an astrology fad, and several state-of-the-art telescopes were ordered for the roof on behalf of scholars who thought they could derive useful match-pairs from the names of star signs. These efforts never yielded anything interesting, as astrology is fake, but the stargazing was pleasantā. Despite the footnote it seems to me that the telescopes on the top of the tower only exist because Kuang wanted to make reference to stargazing from the roof of the astronomy tower.
Once Iād made this Potter connection I started to see it everywhere. Parts of the writing felt like they could have been pulled from those books, like this passage that you could probably convince me came from Order Of The Phoenix:
And then they were free. Not for long ā they had the summer off, and then they would repeat all the miseries theyād just endured, with twice the agony, during their fourth-year exams. But September felt so far away. It was only May, and the whole summer lay before them. It felt now as if they had all the time in the world to do nothing but be happy, if they could just remember how.
I was even able to predict one of the large plot points in the later parts of the book almost perfectly because I drew a parallel between Lettyās father and Marietta Edgecombeās mother. Iām aware that Kuang has talked about grappling with what to do with her Harry Potter memorabilia post-Rowling revealing herself to be a horrible person in an interview with Clarkesworld, so I donāt think Iām entirely misguided in thinking that some elements of Potter fandom may have made it into her work. (I, too, have had to go through a process of divorcing myself from those books, which meant a lot to me when I was younger).
One criticism Iāve seen repeated a lot is that all of the characters sound like theyāve stepped out of the 2020s with the exception of the white men, who all speak like theyāre in the 1830s. I was looking for this as I read it, and honestly I disagree. The book does feel very modern and anachronistic, yes - at one point Letty shoots someone āa droll lookā and says āSay moreā, which is a very modern turn of phrase - but I donāt think thatās a flaw and I donāt think the white people in the novel sound any different to any other character. In fact Letty is, very much, one of the white people who turn out to be villains, yet here sheās speaking like she has a Twitter account.
This goes back to my earlier discussion of whether this is in conversation with Norrell or Harry Potter. Where Norrell is written in more time-appropriate language, Babel is very much a piece of modern commercial fiction. Itās written well, and Kuang has a very distinct voice, but despite being set in the 1830s this is not historical fiction - and thatās not just fine, I think itās intentional and I think itās something Kuang addresses in the text, albeit quite obliquely.
Thereās a moment when the characters discuss the nature of translation, and Professor Playfair addresses the idea of fidelity of faithlessness in translation. Weāre treated to this exchange:
āāTranslators are always being accused of faithlessness,ā boomed Professor Playfair. āSo what does that entail, this faithfulness? Fidelity to whom? The text? The audience? The author? Is fidelity separate from style? From beauty? Let us begin with what Dryden wrote about the Aeneid. I have endeavoured to make Virgil speak such English as he would himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present age.ā He looked around the classroom. āDoes anyone here think that is fidelity?ā
āIāll bite,ā said Ramy. āNo, I donāt think that can possibly be right. Virgil belonged to a particular time and place. Isnāt it more unfaithful to strip all that away, to make him speak like any Englishman you might run into on the street?āā
After more discussion, we eventually come to the conclusion that āEither you situate the text in its time and place, or you bring it to where you are, here and now. Youāre always giving something upā. In Babel, then, what we see is not an attempt to portray a realistic 1830s Oxford. Kuang tells us explicitly in her introduction that this isnāt the case. Instead what weāre seeing is 1830s Oxford and the politics of colonialism being brought to where we are, in order to make a point to modern readers.
I said at the start of this review that the defensiveness of the introduction led me to read the book more critically than I might otherwise have done, and I donāt want to give the impression that I didnāt like it or donāt think itās a worthwhile read. Frankly, I wouldnāt generally spend my time writing several thousand words about something I didnāt like. Many of the best books Iāve read this year have explored the experience of Middle- and Far-Eastern immigrants to the United States or the effects of colonialism on indigenous peoples - C Pam Zhangās How Much Of These Hills Is Gold, Sarah Cypherās The Skin And Its Girl, Tiffany Morrisā Green Fuse Burning - and I was really looking forward to reading something that turns that lens on my own culture and history. In saying that I wish the book had gone further, part of what Iām saying is that I went into Babel with a desire for the text to make me feel uncomfortable about my identity as a white British person, and Iām a little disappointed that it didnāt hit me harder. But with that aside, this was a joy to read. Kuangās prose is strong and I felt immersed in her world.
The novel is definitely at its best in the front half as we get situated in Oxford and spend time with Robin and his friends as they study. The academic setting really shines and, as a former Potter fan who no longer reads those books, this felt very familiar and comforting in a lot of ways. The plot falters a little once the revolution begins, unfortunately, and I found the siege of the tower at the end of the book to be one of the weakest parts of the novel, but the nearly 600 pages rattled by at an unbelievable pace and I was left feeling very glad that I finally got around to reading this.
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