Babel by R.F. Kuang
(HarperVoyager, 2022)
Reviewed by Kevan Manwaring
Babel is a dark academia novel by R.F. Kuang, author of The Poppy War trilogy, and a dazzling academic herself. A Marshall Scholar and Chinese-English translator, with an MPhil from Cambridge and an MSc from Oxford, she is now engaged in doctoral study at Yale. This (possibly) standalone novel concerns a talented young Cantonese boy who adopts the name Robin Swift. He is plucked from the deathbed of his mother amongst the slums of his homeland by a strict Oxford professor, who cultivates his ward’s gift with languages to the point when Swift is able to become a student of the prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—the tallest building in the heart of an alternative Oxford. Here, the power of translation is used to activate silver bars which generate the qualities evoked by the ‘matching pairs’ of the translated languages: energy, wealth, control. These drive the dominance of the British Empire, growing fat and powerful via the exploitation of the resources, slave labour, and talent of their ‘subjects’ from the colonies and from other countries.
At first Swift is enthralled by the City of Dreaming Spires, but soon learns the harsh realities of being non-white and non-Western, however talented. Fortunately, he finds kindred spirits in a small group of friends who quickly bond, united by their outsider status: Black; Asian; Chinese; female; Muslim—all reasons for their fellow students, townsfolk, and the institution itself to ostracise them.
Yet when Swift stumbles upon a burglary of silver bars and instinctively helps someone who appears to be his twin, he becomes embroiled in a dangerous demi-monde, where a secret society fights to overthrow the rapacious Empire. Kuang has clearly drawn upon her experience of being a student at Oxford, even though she is at pains in her foreword to emphasise it is only ‘a work of fiction’.
Nevertheless, much of the novel’s impact comes from not only its vivid sense of place (in a slightly tilted Oxford reminiscent of Pullman’s Jordan College) but an excoriating deconstruction of the glittering shibboleths of her alma mater—its elitist snobbery, territoriality, and exploitative neoliberal model, which hoovers up and capitalises upon talent.
Most of all, and perhaps more mercilessly and insightfully, it exposes the Colonialist and Racist foundations of the university, and of the British Empire, for which it serves as metonym. In a paratextual way, the footnotes provide a counter-narrative to this hegemony. Many are factual, perhaps belying Kuang’s scholarly habits, but some are counterfactual, in the spirit of Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.
A fantasy novel about language is going to be riddled with intertextuality, and that is the case here. It is both a love letter to language, libraries, and to global literature in particular, but also a cri-de-coeur against its weaponisation and commercialisation. Polyglottal fluency both empowers and enslaves the protagonists: they become ‘assets’ of the Empire, but ones with agency who choose to rebel.
The friendship between the four of them, the nuanced and fluid dynamics, are brilliantly dramatised—their fellowship provides the cornerstones of this towering novel, whose vaulting ambition is veritably Promethean. It seems to want to tear down the whole corrupt edifice of Western ‘civilisation’ and evoke revolt—a poignant coda of Percy Shelley’s ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ perhaps (Shelley famously being expelled from Oxford for his paper on atheism).
As a late member of the loose circle of writers known as the Oxford Fantasists (whose member include Lewis Carroll, CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Susan Cooper, and Philip Pullman) Kuang seems determined to turn the burning glass of the imagination on the city itself. Here, the fantasy feels closer to home and nearer to the knuckle, exposing painful home truths.
Yet, the novel never becomes a mere diatribe or screed, thanks to Kuang’s command of the narrative. The chapters are as solidly constructed as chambers in the titular tower—with everything leading to the spectacular conclusion, with only the odd indulgent digression for scones: a self-confessed weakness of the novelist’s, and a couple of side-chapters, fleshing out two of the supporting characters. A magical education narrative could easily become Potterish in lesser hands, but the bite of realism and constant reminders of the fault-lines of society help to avoid any cosy supernaturalism. Kuang goes for the jugular.
This is a finely controlled, but fierce, roar of a novel, an Oxonian Fight Club, inflected by the emotive debates that have broken upon the walls of academe recently around colonialism, the legacy of slavery, equality, diversity, and representation.
Review from BSFA Review 23 - Download your copy here.