Babel, or, The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution

I was expecting a good book - I was not expecting a book to be this entertaining while being asked to confront so many tough questions. Calling it fantasy isn't quite adequate - parts historical fiction, magical realism and post-colonial fiction. Kuang gives us a glimpse at our own history without the myth of exceptionalism, through the eyes of those who've been exploited the most by it, through a couple of memorable characters. I'll be looking for more by the author in the future.

Well that was absolutely brilliant. I loved the academic setting, the dark academia, the complicities of race/power/privilege/revolutions—all the things, really—and the philosophizing about the art of translation. I loved the characters, the writing (it's a dense book, but more easily readable that you might think), and, above all, the way Kuang was able to turn translation into literal magic that this version of Britain lived and died by. Wow. What a great book.

As a former translator, I NEEDED to read this book. Translators at the centre of a revolution? Yes please. I liked that it was an alternate history with just a sprinkling of magic in the silver-working; it felt very plausible. I also liked the discursive footnotes throughout the story, although the asterisk in the main text was sometimes too small for me to find. Similarly, the author’s note at the beginning was a great way to explain what had been changed about actual history to accommodate Babel—I liked that Kuang moved her favourite Oxford cafe through time so that Robin, Letty, Ramy, and Victoire could enjoy the goodies there. Despite the book's size, I couldn't put it down, because the characters and their actions were so show more compelling. I thought the ending was perfect. Highly recommended if the premise interests you. show less

A young boy is taken from his home in China, renamed Robin, and raised by an unfeeling linguistics professor in Victorian England. He learns a variety of languages and eventually matriculates to a real school: Babel, a college in Oxford that creates magic using the slight differences in meaning between words in different languages. Babel students provide all of upperclass Britain and the government with engraved silver bars that make their ships faster, their buildings stronger, and their gardens greener. For awhile Robin is intrigued and proud to be a cog in this glorious machine, but soon the scales begin to fall from his eyes - the college only wants him because he’s “foreign” and therefore has stronger language powers, but he show more will never belong in Britain because he’s not white. He wakes up to the toll colonialism takes on all of its lower class subjects, and joins an underground revolutionary group trying to fight against the status quo. But can they actually do anything against the goliath British Empire?

I loved the philosophy of language, I loved the magical academia, I loved the examination of colonialism. I felt like the consideration of various subjects was thoughts from my own head that I have never been able to put into words. It’s an incredibly topical book, involving Luddites (skilled artisans who fight against their work being replaced with dangerous machines making shoddy products, but get painted as technophobes) and state violence against nations who won’t allow themselves to be exploited, but really those are just timeless topics under capitalism. This book really scratched an itch for me, and reminded me of a lot of my other favorite books: The Golden Compass, The Magicians, and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. show less

I put off reading Babel for a long time because it seemed intimidating or boring for some reason- maybe the overwrought black and white cover? But after reading Yellowface, I correctly deduced that my intuition was wrong. What Kuang got right for me was an interesting new twist on the overused magical school trope, and a plot that made the rather abrupt transition from slow and cozy to propulsive and violent. I would quibble with the lack of character development for some characters, and the didactic nature of some of the exposition. But overall it really was a good, and, I think necessarily more explicit, addition to fantasy treatments of racism and colonialism.

I can't say that Kuang didn't succeed at what she was trying to do, I think more likely the book works as intended and I just would've preferred different intentions, but I can't help feeling that the ideas and the prose in this—which are both often very good—would've been better served by something other than this book.

The basic premise of the language-based magic system is of course a great idea. The way it's used in this colonialist setting is an extremely heavy-handed metaphor—which isn't inherently a bad thing, that depends on how well the things being used as metaphors are executed and I think overall Kuang pulls that off fairly well, coming up with pieces of wordplay that are both interesting in themselves and well suited show more to their story function. The main point-of-view character is well written, and the alt-historical setting is vividly written, despite having a heavy element of "most things are somehow the same as in real history, regardless of magic, because that's what I want to write about." Once we get to Oxford it becomes vivid in a different way that works less well for me, even though (or maybe because) it's coming from something closer to the author's personal experience; there are passages that read to me less like things happening to this character in this world, and more like Kuang venting about people and attitudes she encountered as a foreign grad student at Oxford. It's also kind of hilarious to see how blatantly the world-building is geared toward not just making a personal area of interest—the study of languages—central to the magic system, but specifically making foreign grad students at Oxford who study languages the most important people in the world, who can bring down the British Empire all by themselves. (I don't think that that's a spoiler; the setup is made clear pretty early on, the surprise is mainly in finding out that, yes, the situation and the course of action really are as simple as they seemed.)

So, about the bringing down of the empire. I realize it's hard with this kind of thing to separate literary preferences from political/philosophical ones, and it'd be silly to complain that a book whose subtitle is "The Necessity of Violence" ends up portraying a situation where violence is necessary, or to complain that a fantasy version of British colonialism is being treated too harshly. But I guess I had hoped for... I don't know, more of an effort in that regard? Kuang is no fool and surely doesn't think that just setting up a fictional situation where reform-minded characters turn out to be naive fools, and ruthless vanguardist characters are vindicated, and all hints that any enemies might be persuaded toward justice are false—and where there's a relatively easy way to blow up the whole system, if you only have the guts—constitutes evidence of how our world works, rather than just evidence that an author can write things to happen that way. I think it's more likely that she just wanted to see what it's like to write something with that approach, since an expected thing would be to include more nuance (which of course also wouldn't be evidence in itself of how the world works). I get that there's a kind of catharsis in just imagining such a victory. Still it feels empty to me: a victory over an empire of straw men that's been rigged to collapse... while all of the earlier imaginative efforts in the book, the evocative ideas about linguistic magic and the character writing and the texture of life in this world, are basically discarded as no longer useful except for the parts that facilitate grad students blowing things up. show less

STUNNING. Kuang's ode to Oxford is also a love-hate relationship––just like the two sides of the silver bars used magically in this novel to support England's Industrial Revolution in the 1830s as well as their arrogant pursuit of colonialism. Dark academia, meticulous etymology, bildungsroman, speculative fiction that reads like fiction and NF at the same time ... I am completely gobsmacked. I'll be reeling from this one for a long time.