Book Review: Babel

Babel by R.F. Kuang

This book has magic in it, but it’s not a fantasy book so much as a historical fiction about the intersection of identity and 19th century British Colonialism. Most of the book takes place at Oxford, and carries the to-me delightful conceit that magic relies on the existence of those ineffable nuances of things that are lost in translation. A word is written on one side of a silver bar, and it’s translated into another language on the other side of the bar, and the context that is lost becomes the spell. Suffice it to say, in this world, translators wield enormous political power and significance.

Our hero, Robin, is born in Canton to a Cantonese mother and an Englishman. This Englishman is Professor Lovell, an excretably pompous prick of a man who shows up when Robin is newly orphaned to take Robin back to England to fulfill the destiny of becoming a great scholar and linguist under Lovell’s direction. Lovell offers Robin a choice, and Robin chooses to go insomuch as the alternative is dying of cholera, penniless and alone. However, Robin does take very well to the scholarly life. He meets his cohort of three other students, and the four become fast friends.

One day Robin meets a man who looks a lot like him, a man who turns out to be his half-brother Griffin. Griffin introduces Robin into the Hermes society, which has been stealing silver and documents from Oxford in order to fight back against British colonialism. Specifically, they’re stealing it from Robin’s particular college, which is in a tower known as Babel. Robin is never actually sure what the Hermes society is accomplishing, and how, and he’s put off by their secrecy. Is he allied with their anti-colonialist stance and attempt to erode the global British might, or is he too much in love with his Oxford life and the glorious future it seems to offer him?

This book’s strength lies in the nuance with which it probes identity, race, and belonging. Robin’s three friends have their own strengths and weaknesses. Robin is advantaged in that he is male and can pass for white, so he’s less likely to be assaulted and he can get books from the library without people mistaking him for a housemaid. But his friend Rami, who was raised in Calcutta to Indian parents, has a strong sense of identity and never wonders exactly who he is or where he belongs. Victoire has the heaviest burden, since she’s Black and female and has lived so long in France that she barely remembers anything of her homeland Haiti. Lettie has a dead brother and a dead mother and a father who can barely stand to look at her, much less support her desire for an education.

While the book eventually gives backstories for all four of these characters, making their motives a lot more clear and sympathetic, it focuses primarily on Robin. Griffin tells Robin (who is happy to be an Oxford scholar) that there will come a time when he can’t do the things they ask of him, and when the four students sail to Canton on a school trip, Robin learns that’s true. Robin’s father, and the people that Oxford and the British empire ally with, are scheming, racist, arrogant, greedy thugs. They hold utter contempt for the Chinese people and consider them inferior in every way, and yet desperately want Chinese goods and have nothing valuable to offer in exchange except silver. And opium, of course.

Three of the four of the students realize that when one of them makes a mistake, it affects all of them. Lettie, however, is too entrenched in the privilege of society to realize this. The students attend a party, and Lettie can’t understand why Rami won’t dance with her, because she’s never been threatened with violence on account of her skin color. She expects–and largely receives–as much courtesy as a woman can be afforded in this society. It puts a wall between her and the foreign-born students in her class. When Robin does something to endanger them all, she is not convinced that the act cannot be papered over. She does not understand that the rules are different for those who are not considered truly English. She is not really against colonialism, and this puts her at odds with her friends.

The author foreshadows tension between the four of them early on, in Robin’s poignant delight in how happy they are together compared to what eventually happens. The stakes gradually increase as teh tension does. They might get poor marks. They might not pass their exam. They might be expelled from Oxford. They might be tried for a crime. They might be shot. (One magical–if not intentionally so–aspect of this book is that just about any time someone shoots a gun at a person, the person dies. Even weak-wristed students prove to be superb shots.) Then it’s not just their own lives that are at risk, but the lives of innocent people they’ve never met. As the stakes ramp up, so too does their resolve, and the distance between them grows as they’re forced to decide where their allegiances lie. Robin shifts from a timid, passive boy who’s not quite sure what he wants to a leader willing to risk everything for what he believes in.

I found the ending very satisfying, and I would probably read a sequel if there was one, but you just know it’s going to be full of pain and violence and unjust suffering. Still, despite the darkness, it wasn’t just a grim dystopia but a story of deep friendships and the things that strengthened and weakened those friendships.


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