Review: “Babel” by R. F. Kuang

Thumbs down (sorta) for Babel, or the Necessity of Violence by R. F. Kuang. Historical fantasy.

The description made me very excited about this book – Oxford in the early 19th century! revolution against the British colonial empire! economics! a magic system based on translation! Chinese characters (hanzi, not people) in the footnotes! ….But then I read it, and it didn’t work for me as a novel – the characters keep having the same conversations; the traitor is painfully obvious; and even when intense incident occurs, life somehow keeps resetting to “normal” for the characters, so there’s no feeling of forward motion. Furthermore, despite a really interesting magical system, the world in this book is weirdly, unbelievably, somehow, indistinguishable from our own. (Except that everyone from c. 1838 sounds like they’re from 2022. And why does the written Chinese use simplified characters, which are anachronistic by about 100 years? In a book about language…why?) My initial Goodreads rating was 2 stars. However, after thinking about it a lot, I believe I missed the author’s intent. If Babel is read not as a fantasy novel but as a primer to British Colonialism in Asia, The Evils of Empire, Racism in Academia, Microaggressions, Class Warfare, and Translation Theory, it earns a solid 5 stars. If I were a younger or more politically sheltered person – and one who did not myself write historical novels in an immediately adjacent time period – and had not studied linguistics as a primary interest for many years – and Chinese for a few years – this book could well have blown my mind. Maybe it’s the book for you? But I will say, if you know this period of history well, this book doesn’t stretch the source material – the actual past – basically at all.

The study meeting turned out much livelier than expected. Robin, who was used to reading his translations out loud to Mr Chester, who drolly corrected him as he went, was not anticipating such hearty debate over turns of phrase, punctuation, or how much repetition was too much. It quickly became apparent that they had drastically different translation styles. Letty, who was a stickler for grammatical structures as much as possible, seemed ready to forgive the most astoundingly awkward manipulations of prose, while Ramy, her polar opposite, was always ready to abandon technical accuracy for rhetorical flourishes he insisted would better deliver the point, even when this meant insertion of completely novel clauses. Victoire seemed constantly frustrated with the limits of English – ‘It’s so awkward, French would suit this better’–and Letty always vehemently disagreed, which made Ramy snort, at which point the topic of Ovid was abandoned for a repeat of the Napoleonic Wars.