Book Review - R.F. Kuang's Babel
Babel by R.F. Kuang
Published by: Harper Voyager
Publication Date: August 23rd, 2022
Format: Hardcover, 560 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy
Magic exists. It exists in the words etched into bars of silver and the latitude in the interpretation of a single word from one language to another. But you are always giving something up in the conversion and it's the bar that manifests what's lost in translation into being. At the Royal Institute of Translation in Oxford, commonly called Babel, they make magic with words and hoard the knowledge. The bars are used for anything from curing disease to holding up a bridge to making your carriage have a less bumpy ride. The newest most powerful bars rely on Chinese, Sanskrit, and Arabic. The romance languages have become overused and English, being such a magpie language, means that words from whole dialects soon lose their power. Therefore if you know an obscure language, you are a valuable commodity. Because the thirst for, the need for this knowledge of rare languages, is unending. Which makes the tower the epicenter of colonialism. It feeds the need for expansion because language is an infinite resource so long as you can find and control it. But silver is not. Which means that in order to keep your carriage comfy war is necessary. Because the Royal Institute of Translation doesn't help the poor, the downtrodden, those societies where they spirited their scholars from, they help the rich, the professors lining their pockets, and, above all, the Crown. Robin Swift is soon going to learn all this in his short life. Professor Lovell rescues Robin from a cholera outbreak in Canton and brings him to his home in England. There he trains Robin in all the rudiments necessary for entry into Babel. When Robin achieves this goal he thinks that his life will be perfect. When he arrives in Oxford and meets Ramy, a member of his cohort from Calcutta, the two of them spend a few blissful days until the other students arrive and they realize they are men at Oxford not Oxford men. Which makes them stick to the tower and their work and the other members of their cohort, Victoire, from Haiti, and Letty, a true Brit. They are united because of Babel and their precarious position that makes them simultaneously bold and terrified. Though the more they learn of the outside world, and the shadowy Hermes Society which Robin's brother Griffin is a part of after his ouster from Babel, life becomes about a moral compromise to survive. But translation itself is a betrayal, you are doing violence to the original by warping if for foreign ears. When what you do on a daily basis is a violent act, how long does it take until you make a real stand?
The Princess Bride. It's a classic. It's perfection. Which is why so many people try to lure you in by saying something is "like" it. It took thirty-seven years for me to agree with critics that something was worthy of that honor. The recipient is My Lady Jane which was cancelled prematurely. I'm still bitter. My love for Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is close to if not equal to The Princess Bride which is why, again, when someone says "this" is a worthy successor, I look at them with confusion in my eyes, because they keep saying that word and I do not think it means what they think it means. Babel in particular should not be mentioned in the same breath as Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Just because it's set around the same time period in Regency England and there's magic doesn't make it a worthy successor. Yes, it can be in the conversation if that conversation is how to trick people into reading a book where each chapter felt longer than the whole book. And this isn't figurative, it's literal. My reading speed is about a book a week, Babel took me eighteen days to read. And it's not that it's badly written, it's just unedited spewing forth of irrelevancies. This book isn't what this book was billed as. It's not about magic and the marvels of the written language and how words grow and change and evolve and how languages have to be lived to be understood and Oxford is the opposite of real life, it's a book about colonialism and the stupidest stand in fictional history. Babel, or the Necessity of Violence is supposedly an "Arcane History" and it reads, to that extent, like a history book. A very boring history book about what you might call the translators' war. Because Robin goes nuclear and destroys Babel. Oops, sorry, spoilers, but I did warn you about the stupidest stand in fictional history and that's it. So we're supposed to be intrigued by these scholars that are able to move past the realm of ideas into the realm of action, something Oxford was wholly unprepared for? I'm sorry, but I literally did not care. Robin and his stand? Sure, it ground things to a halt for a few days and caused probably more harm than good but I just didn't care. I just couldn't get behind these characters plodding about and being too dumb to live. They literally didn't even know how to dispose of a body. Seriously!?! They were on a boat. But overall this book just left a bad taste in my mouth because it felt like it was preaching that violence is the answer and yet the violence answered nothing. Especially not why this book was written. Unless it was to show that higher education is a scam, because, yeah, it did show that.
A Hero for WondLa by Tony DiTerlizzi
