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A review by incrediblemelk
Babel by R.F. Kuang
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
mysterious
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
The blurb describes Babel as “a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal response to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” – and this is absolutely correct. It’s intricately world-built magical alt-history like Susanna Clarke’s epic novel, and it uses footnotes in a similar scholarly way to make the act of reading the book itself feel like research, placing you into the same academic habitus as the student characters.
It’s also an intensely satisfying dark academia novel, much closer to the claustrophobic, erudite feel of The Secret History than many of the ‘campus coterie’ novels I’ve read which try to recapture that feeling.
As someone with an interest in etymology I also adored the way the central silver-working magic works, and I loved reading about the languages and translations, following the classroom debates as if I were auditing the class myself.
But it’s also a hugely successful dark academia novel because it explicitly critiques the source of the aesthetic pleasure in the dark academia trope: the yearning of outsiders to belong to an elite institution because they crave elite acceptance, but the gnawing recognition that such institutions will never truly accept them and instead only treat them as temporary, expendable assets or entertainments.
Here, the way that manifests as bittersweet is explicitly linked to what WEB DuBois calls “double consciousness” and Frantz Fanon calls “black skin, white masks”: the way it is another kind of white-supremacist domination that the colonised person internalises and judges themselves by the values of the coloniser who hates them.
From DuBois:
“One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body…”
From Kuang:
“He had become so good at holding two truths in his head at once. That he was an Englishman and not. That Professor Lovell was his father and not. That the Chinese were a stupid, backwards people, and that he was also one of them. That he hated Babel, and wanted to live forever in its embrace.”
And Kuang places translation at the heart of all of this: the idea of translation as an act of inherent betrayal, plunder and misunderstanding, but equally its radical potential for listening and being understood:
“Robin wondered then how much of Anthony’s life had been spent carefully translating himself to white people … And he wondered if there would ever be a day that came when all this was unnecessary, when white people would look at him and Anthony and simply listen…”
I really loved how hard Kuang goes on the anti-colonialism and how bleakly realistic she is about the overwhelmingly dense intersections of global capital. There are no consolingly heroic moments in which our heroes ‘defeat’ the forces arrayed against them: the novel is quite explicit about the way that civility, generosity and compromise will always fail because your opponent never listens or even treats you as fully human.
But equally, in this book big gestures of sacrifice are the easy way out and death and killing are not cathartic or transformative but pointless and wasteful. It’s less narratively satisfying, but much harder and more worthwhile, to live day to day and to defy the colony by refusing to be annihilated, because even the deaths of the colonised are aestheticised and sentimentalised as narrative to rob them of their political power.
I also loved how hard the book is on white women as the handmaidens of power. As a white woman myself I reflected so much on how baked-in the sense of liberal-feminist victimhood is in place of true empathy and listening, how easy it is to feel entitled to intimacy and kindness rather than to earn them, and how tempting it is to seek only a contingent solidarity with nonwhite people that makes us feel virtuous but doesn’t require us to radically reshape our worldview or sacrifice our social status.
The genius of this book is that it sucks you in with the promise of a dark-academia campus novel with a cool ‘secret society’, and is deeply satisfying on those grounds, but then by the end the characters’ world has shifted so profoundly that you, like the characters, look back on those early parts of the book thinking how shallow and naive they are.
It’s so cleverly constructed, and such a shrewd view of 19th-century geopolitics and technology and culture and social relations, with real-life things woven through in ways that emphasise their status as products of colonial capitalism.
It made me think so much, and a novel of ideas that’s also satisfying on the level of story and character is something I treasure.
It’s also an intensely satisfying dark academia novel, much closer to the claustrophobic, erudite feel of The Secret History than many of the ‘campus coterie’ novels I’ve read which try to recapture that feeling.
As someone with an interest in etymology I also adored the way the central silver-working magic works, and I loved reading about the languages and translations, following the classroom debates as if I were auditing the class myself.
But it’s also a hugely successful dark academia novel because it explicitly critiques the source of the aesthetic pleasure in the dark academia trope: the yearning of outsiders to belong to an elite institution because they crave elite acceptance, but the gnawing recognition that such institutions will never truly accept them and instead only treat them as temporary, expendable assets or entertainments.
Here, the way that manifests as bittersweet is explicitly linked to what WEB DuBois calls “double consciousness” and Frantz Fanon calls “black skin, white masks”: the way it is another kind of white-supremacist domination that the colonised person internalises and judges themselves by the values of the coloniser who hates them.
From DuBois:
“One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body…”
From Kuang:
“He had become so good at holding two truths in his head at once. That he was an Englishman and not. That Professor Lovell was his father and not. That the Chinese were a stupid, backwards people, and that he was also one of them. That he hated Babel, and wanted to live forever in its embrace.”
And Kuang places translation at the heart of all of this: the idea of translation as an act of inherent betrayal, plunder and misunderstanding, but equally its radical potential for listening and being understood:
“Robin wondered then how much of Anthony’s life had been spent carefully translating himself to white people … And he wondered if there would ever be a day that came when all this was unnecessary, when white people would look at him and Anthony and simply listen…”
I really loved how hard Kuang goes on the anti-colonialism and how bleakly realistic she is about the overwhelmingly dense intersections of global capital. There are no consolingly heroic moments in which our heroes ‘defeat’ the forces arrayed against them: the novel is quite explicit about the way that civility, generosity and compromise will always fail because your opponent never listens or even treats you as fully human.
But equally, in this book big gestures of sacrifice are the easy way out and death and killing are not cathartic or transformative but pointless and wasteful. It’s less narratively satisfying, but much harder and more worthwhile, to live day to day and to defy the colony by refusing to be annihilated, because even the deaths of the colonised are aestheticised and sentimentalised as narrative to rob them of their political power.
I also loved how hard the book is on white women as the handmaidens of power. As a white woman myself I reflected so much on how baked-in the sense of liberal-feminist victimhood is in place of true empathy and listening, how easy it is to feel entitled to intimacy and kindness rather than to earn them, and how tempting it is to seek only a contingent solidarity with nonwhite people that makes us feel virtuous but doesn’t require us to radically reshape our worldview or sacrifice our social status.
The genius of this book is that it sucks you in with the promise of a dark-academia campus novel with a cool ‘secret society’, and is deeply satisfying on those grounds, but then by the end the characters’ world has shifted so profoundly that you, like the characters, look back on those early parts of the book thinking how shallow and naive they are.
It’s so cleverly constructed, and such a shrewd view of 19th-century geopolitics and technology and culture and social relations, with real-life things woven through in ways that emphasise their status as products of colonial capitalism.
It made me think so much, and a novel of ideas that’s also satisfying on the level of story and character is something I treasure.