Babel

Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution, to give it its full title, is a standalone dark academia fantasy set in the 1830s and 1840s, primarily in Oxford, England. The first book of R.F. Kuang's previous trilogy, The Poppy War, was nominated for multiple awards and won the Compton Crook Award for best first novel. Babel is her fourth book.

Robin Swift, although that was not his name at the time, was born and raised in Canton and educated by an inexplicable English tutor his family could not have afforded. After his entire family dies of cholera, he is plucked from China by a British professor and offered a life in England as his ward. What follows is a paradise of books, a hell of relentless and demanding instruction, and an unpredictably abusive emotional environment, all aiming him towards admission to Oxford University. Robin will join University College and the Royal Institute of Translation.

The politics of this imperial Britain are almost precisely the same as in our history, but one of the engines is profoundly different. This world has magic. If words from two different languages are engraved on a metal bar (silver is best), the meaning and nuance lost in translation becomes magical power. With a careful choice of translation pairs, and sometimes additional help from other related words and techniques, the silver bar becomes a persistent spell. Britain's industrial revolution is in overdrive thanks to the country's vast stores of silver and the applied translation prowess of Babel.

This means Babel is also the only part of very racist Oxford that accepts non-white students and women. They need translators (barely) more than they care about maintaining social hierarchy; translation pairs only work when the translator is fluent in both languages. The magic is also stronger when meanings are more distinct, which is creating serious worries about classical and European languages. Those are still the bulk of Babel's work, but increased trade and communication within Europe is eroding the meaning distinctions and thus the amount of magical power. More remote languages, such as Chinese and Urdu, are full of untapped promise that Britain's colonial empire wants to capture. Professor Lowell, Robin's dubious benefactor, is a specialist in Chinese languages; Robin is a potential tool for his plans.

As Robin discovers shortly after arriving in Oxford, he is not the first of Lowell's tools. His predecessor turned against Babel and is trying to break its chokehold on translation magic. He wants Robin to help.

This is one of those books that is hard to review because it does some things exceptionally well and other things that did not work for me. It's not obvious if the latter are flaws in the book or a mismatch between book and reader (or, frankly, flaws in the reader). I'll try to explain as best I can so that you can draw your own conclusions.

First, this is one of the all-time great magical system hooks. The way words are tapped for power is fully fleshed out and exceptionally well-done. Kuang is a professional translator, which shows in the attention to detail on translation pairs. I think this is the best-constructed and explained word-based magic system I've read in fantasy. Many word-based systems treat magic as its own separate language that is weirdly universal. Here, Kuang does the exact opposite, and the result is immensely satisfying.

A fantasy reader may expect exploration of this magic system to be the primary point of the book, however, and this is not the case. It is an important part of the book, and its implications are essential to the plot resolution, but this is not the type of fantasy novel where the plot is driven by character exploration of the magic system. The magic system exists, the characters use it, and we do get some crunchy details, but the heart of the book is elsewhere. If you were expecting the typical relationship of a fantasy novel to its magic system, you may get a bit wrong-footed.

Similarly, this is historical fantasy, but it is the type of historical fantasy where the existence of magic causes no significant differences. For some people, this is a pet peeve; personally, I don't mind that choice in the abstract, but some of the specifics bugged me.

The villains of this book assert that any country could have done what Britain did in developing translation magic, and thus their hoarding of it is not immoral. They are obviously partly lying (this is a classic justification for imperialism), but it's not clear from the book how they are lying. Technologies (and magic here works like a technology) tend to concentrate power when they require significant capital investment, and tend to dilute power when they are portable and easy to teach. Translation magic feels like the latter, but its effect in the book is clearly the former, and I was never sure why.

England is not an obvious choice to be a translation superpower. Yes, it's a colonial empire, but India, southeast Asia, and most certainly Africa (the continent largely not appearing in this book) are home to considerably more languages from more wildly disparate families than western Europe. Translation is not a peculiarly European idea, and this magic system does not seem hard to stumble across. It's not clear why England, and Oxford in particular, is so dramatically far ahead. There is some sign that Babel is keeping the mechanics of translation magic secret, but that secret has leaked, seems easy to develop independently, and is simple enough that a new student can perform basic magic with a few hours of instruction. This does not feel like the kind of power that would be easy to concentrate, let alone to the extreme extent required by the last quarter of this book.

The demand for silver as a base material for translation magic provides a justification for mercantilism that avoids the confusing complexities of currency economics in our actual history, so fine, I guess, but it was a bit disappointing for this great of an idea for a magic system to have this small of an impact on politics.

I'll come to the actual thrust of this book in a moment, but first something else Babel does exceptionally well: dark academia.

The remainder of Robin's cohort at Oxford is Remy, a dark-skinned Muslim from Calcutta; Victoire, a Haitian woman raised in France; and Letty, the daughter of a British admiral. All of them are non-white except Letty, and Letty and Victoire additionally have to deal with the blatant sexism of the time. (For example, they have to live several miles from Oxford because women living near the college would be a "distraction.")

The interpersonal dynamics between the four are exceptionally well done. Kuang captures the dislocation of going away to college, the unsettled life upheaval that makes it both easy and vital to form suddenly tight friendships, and the way that the immense pressure from classes and exams leaves one so devoid of spare emotional capacity that those friendships become both unbreakable and badly strained. Robin and Remy almost immediately become inseparable in that type of college friendship in which profound trust and constant companionship happen first and learning about the other person happens afterwards.

It's tricky to talk about this without spoilers, but one of the things Kuang sets up with this friend group is a pointed look at intersectionality. Babel has gotten a lot of positive review buzz, and I think this is one of the reasons why. Kuang does not pass over or make excuses for characters in a place where many other books do. This mostly worked for me, but with a substantial caveat that I think you may want to be aware of before you dive into this book.

Babel is set in the 1830s, but it is very much about the politics of 2022. That does not necessarily mean that the politics are off for the 1830s; I haven't done the research to know, and it's possible I'm seeing the Tiffany problem (Jo Walton's observation that Tiffany is a historical 12th century women's name, but an author can't use it as a medieval name because readers think it sounds too modern). But I found it hard to shake the feeling that the characters make sense of their world using modern analytical frameworks of imperialism, racism, sexism, and intersectional feminism, although without using modern terminology, and characters from the 1830s would react somewhat differently. This is a valid authorial choice; all books are written for the readers of the time when they're published. But as with magical systems that don't change history, it's a pet peeve for some readers. If that's you, be aware that's the feel I got from it.

The true center of this book is not the magic system or the history. It's advertised directly in the title — the necessity of violence — although it's not until well into the book before the reader knows what that means. This is a book about revolution, what revolution means, what decisions you have to make along the way, how the personal affects the political, and the inadequacy of reform politics. It is hard, uncomfortable, and not gentle on its characters.

The last quarter of this book was exceptional, and I understand why it's getting so much attention. Kuang directly confronts the desire for someone else to do the necessary work, the hope that surely the people with power will see reason, and the feeling of despair when there are no good plans and every reason to wait and do nothing when atrocities are about to happen. If you are familiar with radical politics, these aren't new questions, but this is not the sort of thing that normally shows up in fantasy. It does not surprise me that Babel struck a nerve with readers a generation or two younger than me. It captures that heady feeling on the cusp of adulthood when everything is in flux and one is assembling an independent politics for the first time. Once I neared the end of the book, I could not put it down. The ending is brutal, but I think it was the right ending for this book.

There are two things, though, that I did not like about the political arc.

The first is that Victoire is a much more interesting character than Robin, but is sidelined for most of the book. The difference of perspectives between her and Robin is the heart of what makes the end of this book so good, and I wish that had started 300 pages earlier. Or, even better, I wish Victoire had been the protagonist; I liked Robin, but he's a very predictable character for most of the book. Victoire is not; even the conflicts she had earlier in the book, when she didn't get much attention in the story, felt more dynamic and more thoughtful than Robin's mix of guilt and anxiety.

The second is that I wish Kuang had shown more of Robin's intellectual evolution. All of the pieces of why he makes the decisions that he does are present in this book, and Kuang shows his emotional state (sometimes in agonizing detail) at each step, but the sense-making, the development of theory and ideology beneath the actions, is hinted at but not shown. This is a stylistic choice with no one right answer, but it felt odd because so much of the rest of the plot is obvious and telegraphed. If the reader shares Robin's perspective, I think it's easy to fill in the gaps, but it felt odd to read Robin giving clearly thought-out political analyses at the end of the book without seeing the hashing-out and argument with friends required to develop those analyses. I felt like I had to do a lot of heavy lifting as the reader, work that I wish had been done directly by the book.

My final note about this book is that I found much of it extremely predictable. I think that's part of why reviewers describe it as accessible and easy to read; accessibility and predictability can be two sides of the same coin. Kuang did not intend for this book to be subtle, and I think that's part of the appeal. But very few of Robin's actions for the first three-quarters of the book surprised me, and that's not always the reading experience I want. The end of the book is different, and I therefore found it much more gripping, but it takes a while to get there.

Babel is, for better or worse, the type of fantasy where the politics, economics, and magic system exist primarily to justify the plot the author wanted. I don't think the societal position of the Institute of Translation that makes the ending possible is that believable given the nature of the technology in question and the politics of the time, and if you are inclined to dig into the specifics of the world-building, I think you will find it frustrating. Where it succeeds brilliantly is in capturing the social dynamics of hothouse academic cohorts, and in making a sharp and unfortunately timely argument about the role of violence in political change, in a way that the traditionally conservative setting of fantasy rarely does.

I can't say Babel blew me away, but I can see why others liked it so much. If I had to guess, I'd say that the closer one is in age to the characters in the book and to that moment of political identity construction, the more it's likely to appeal.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2023-04-13