Too much and too little: a review on Babel by R.F. Kuang
summary
from a reddit post:
this is a dark academia novel, Robin a Cantonese boy, a deliberately produced bastard of an English professor after a childhood in Canton is brought to England to study at the institute for translation, for you see, the world runs on magic, magic etched in Silver through the power of the meaning lost in translation. You write two words, the match pair on a bar of silver in two different languages, words that ostensibly mean the same thing, but not all of it. and when a fluent speaker speaks both words and holds the entire meaning of both words in their heads, magic happens. Robin is sent to school recruited primarily because he knows Chinese, and can therefore find more match pairs for more magic. for you see, the translations between Greek and English, French and English etc has been mined dry, and more exotic language are needed for new and different magic, but you need fluent speakers for that. queue our heroes learning languages at oxford, getting into messes with secret societies all the while fraying under the knowledge that they're there only to sustain the British hegemony. They're an asset brought here for the empire, but not of the empire. And as the British empire is heading towards a confrontation with China over free trade, and the restriction China placed on the opium trade, Robin will try to avert war with his homeland, for the profit of his colonizers, and stuff gets real.
Important notes: this post contains spoilers on both Yellow face and Babel, I have indicated the spoilers in the text, feel free to skip them.
According to my StoryGraph, I started reading Babel on March 5th and finished it on April 12th. In that time, I also read two other books, mostly to dilute the experience of Babel.
Don’t get me wrong, I was excited to buy the book. The hype was real, and Kuang herself? She's the it girl of the publishing world at the moment. So… what went wrong?
It took me until the last 10% of the book to realize the issue might be where the story begins. I prefer narratives that start as close to the finish line as possible. Babel, on the other hand, drags you into many details, while also acting as a literary vehicle for heavy, worthy themes: power, colonialism, minority resistance. Respectable? Absolutely. Enjoyable? Ehh.
To me, it reads like a strange hybrid: Part Harry Potter with students, exams, magic
Part The Secret History with morally gray friendships and intellectual spirals, hints of love and sexual attraction (the author later confirmed Robin is in fact queer). You sometimes get that Donna Tart-style introspection, channeling Richard’s morose voice, but the thing is, The Secret History was explicitly a memoir. Babel isn’t Robin’s memoir. In theory, that sounds incredible.
In execution, it didn’t offer the immersion of Harry Potter, there weren’t sufficient backstories, multiple subplots, or in-depth character and world-building. Too short and yet too long. Too short for all the elements and characters Kuang introduces: identity, friendships, magic system, Oxford life and secret resistance societies. At the same time, it was too lengthy in a borderline boring way, just like The Secret History, for the point she’s trying to make. All the other events and characters feel like shadows, or something she just brushed on.
There were moments when Kuang’s experience at Oxford shone through. And honestly, that gave me the muggle envy, because I’m currently applying for postgraduate studies and would very much like someone to rub my face in the idea of being in Oxford too, thank you!
Anyway, I read the final —and probably best— 10% of the book in the shittiest mood possible. I was trying to finish it before flying back to Iran to be with my Baba, which I failed. So I took my Kindle with me, Then I used it to shield my face as we got the scan results: more metastases.
So yeah, I skimmed the rest. My eyes went over the words, but I couldn’t bring myself to feel anything for Robin.
Maybe it was the rushed character arc, this reincarnated revolutionary version of Griffin, his brother. (Which, by the way, I feel Robin was too fast in accepting that he’s in fact his brother!) Or maybe it was just that my father was in so much pain, trying to hide it by sitting behind me and moaning under his breath, that living the experience in flesh made me not be forgiving about Robin’s approach to death. And Robin, oh, Robin. should've gotten the morals together. Poor Kuang had to drag his privilege-clinging ass all the way to be a resistance-fighter, but only by sacrificing nearly every morally grounded character along the way. I mean… I get it, Kuang is especially talented in writing ignorant characters who are comfortable in their own privilege. But come on, there must be some ideal place for pushing your character to do the right thing other than a pendulum of online threats (Yellowface) or killing literally everyone the main character cares about.
At one point during the read, I actually walked into a bookshop on the verge of tears and asked for a happy book. I needed something kind. Something joyful. Something not set in an alternate-history colonial nightmare.
So yeah, overall? I give my life during those weeks a solid 2/5. And Babel didn’t lift me out of that. It felt more like sitting next to a friend who’s also having a miserable time, except she insists on telling you everything about her week before you get to mention your Baba’s health is deteriorating and you literally feel like you're dying from the inside, a slow, excruciating death, losing the identity of being someone’s daughter forever.
Hence the book dilution strategy. Two, maybe three other books were needed just to emotionally survive.
Here's other blogs I read before sharing this bitter review: