"Babel" by R F Kuang

 If you are seeking a novel that tells you how to think, this may be for you. But I prefer a book that challenges me to think for myself.

In some ways this is 'Harry Potter goes to University'. It even starts with Robin, the boy who lived, being rescued by a magician after his mother dies. Once he arrives at Oxford, the arcane rituals, such as wearing gowns, are told with Rowlingesque relish. And there is magic in amongst the scholarship. The biggest difference seems to be that spells are worked not only in Latin but by evoking the mismatch in the translation of a word between one language and another. Perhaps the only part of this novel that I enjoyed were the moments when the author explains the etymology of words. These nuggets were absolutely fascinating but they did nothing to enhance the plot, the characters or the setting.

The plot involves a struggle between the University, who make magical bars of silver which power industry at home and warships abroad, fostering the domestic inequalities of capitalism and the horrors of colonialism, and a secret society of rebels. It is fundamentally a thriller plot with the usual tropes; I don't think there were any twists that I failed to see coming. The blurb quotes the Guardian: "an ending to blow down walls." But by the time I neared the ending I was bored with the book and I didn't care for any of the cardboard characters, so I skim-read just to get to the end.

Intensely didactic, this book is set in the first half of the nineteenth century so that it condemn the horrors of colonialism with no need for nuance. Issues are presented as black and white; the goodies are always right and the baddies are always wicked. At the same time, it is an alternative history so that its protagonists can have thoroughly modern attitudes and viewpoints, such as "The British are turning my homeland into a narco-military state" (Ch 17). Such anachronisms are made possible by the genre but drain verisimilitude from it.

To hammer its point home it uses footnotes to give the appearance that this is a work of history. Somehow these are even less nuanced than the main text. Some of these footnotes are factual, others are clearly set in the world of the novel. There are also many authorial insertions. RFK may believe that Percy was less talented than Mary Shelley or that William IV was "an eternal compromiser who pleased no one" but it would be more honest to place these opinions in the mouth of a character so they can be seen as opinions.

There is not a single white male character who is good, apart from the obviously named Abel Goodfellow. Skin colour seems to be shorthand for character. "I have never met an Englishman I trusted to do the right thing out of sympathy," says one character in chapter 23 and the only example suggested that breaks this rule is almost immediately shown to be a Judas. Such stereotyping is shallow. I prefer my fiction to have more depth. 

There are plenty of villains. Almost none of the baddies had any saving grace whatsoever. This rendered them caricatures. It's very easy to set up such straw men and knock them down. But I prefer antagonists who feel human, who seem real, who have wants and needs and failings and strengths. They're more authentic, they feel more dangerous, and they can pose emotional and intellectual challenges to the protagonists (and to the readers). 

Sadly, apart from Robin and Griffin, none of the goodies had any complexity to their characters and of these two only Robin had what might be called a character arc, although it was difficult to see how the Robin at the end could have evolved from the Robin of the early pages. These characters weren't flesh and blood, they were puppets clothed to represent aspects of an argument.

Somehow, in a book about young students at university, there was almost no sex. There were some romantic moments and there was a moment when the lead protagonist felt a physical desire for his best buddy but when the lads were offered a prostitute they reacted like maiden ladies from an old novel. Maybe this caters to a new puritan readership but it certainly didn't help the verisimilitude.

I suppose you might regard the novel as a satire, such as Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (from whom Robin takes his surname) but I prefer my novels to have more interesting plots, characters with more than two dimensions, and a deeper appreciations of the problems facing human beings living in an imperfect world.

Selected quotes:

• "He's got the personality of a wet towel: damp and he clings." (Ch 7)
• "The translator dances in shackles." (Ch 8)
• "The thick dawn mists had just given way to blue sky when the horizon revealed a thin strip of green and grey. Slowly this acquired detail, like a dream materializing; the blurred colours became a coast, became a silhouette if buildings behind a mass of ships docking at the tiny point where the Middle Kingdom encountered the world." (Ch 16)
• "The public merely wanted all the conveniences of modern life without the guilt of knowing how these conveniences were produced." (Ch 27)

June 2024; 544 pages

Winner of the 2023 fiction book of the year in the British Book Awards

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"To Paradise" by Hanya Yanagihara

This is a big book divided into three parts, of which the second and third are further subdivided.

The first book seems to be a not particularly original reconsideration of the tension between love and duty. Set in 1894, in an alternative history of New York, centre of a breakaway republic in which gay marriage is the rule rather than the exception, gently, drifting David Bingham, a scion of a powerful banking family, must choose between an arranged marriage with an older man and a love affair with a penniless music teacher who might well be intending to rip him off. Spoiler alert: there is no resolution, the reader will never find out what happens in the end.

The first book is entitled 'Washington Square' and the tension between the husband the paterfamilias wants the child to marry, and the child's own choice of a potential wastrel is very similar to the central tension in the Henry James book of the same name. 

The second book, set in 1994, tells the story of another David Bingham, the kept lover of powerful lawyer Charles Griffith. David would have been heir to the throne of Hawaii if history had been different and the second half of this book is a long letter (written, in secret, by a man who is apparently blind and almost too weak to leave his bed) from his father explaining how he, the dad, was persuaded by another Edward to leave his home and live in the wilderness. Once again, we never find out what happens to the principal characters.

The third book, comprising the second 50% of the novel, alternates between letters written by Charles, a scientist living in 2043 and later, as he describes having to make difficult choices, restricting personal freedoms in a society swept by repeated pandemics, and his granddaughter Charlie, living in a totalitarian regime in New York of the 2090s, mentally and physically scarred by disease, offered an opportunity to escape (but once again we will never learn if she succeeds).

Besides the obvious themes of homosexuality and the response of society to pandemics, each of these three stories has a weak and gentle character, cared for by a more powerful man, forced to decide between being safe and looked after, and risking everything for freedom. 

This is a long novel and I repeatedly questioned whether it was worth the effort of reading. The three stories are linked by devices such as the repeated names and the Washington Square location, and by the themes. But I found this somewhat artificial and irritating, and the lack of resolution of any story irritated me even more. There were also moments of high artificiality, such as the PI report in the first book and the father's letter in the second. There were moments when dinner-table  discussions sounded like dissertations, and when it was implicitly assumed that modern-day mores would survive into the future. Time and again my ability to suspend my disbelief, surely important in a novel rooted in alternative history and dystopian scifi,  was challenged. I got the feeling the Yanagahira was playing with form rather than concentrating on writing a novel that might appeal to the reader. 

Nevertheless, there are brilliant characters, drawn so that the reader really believes in them, and the tensions between what will keep them safe and what might offer them fulfilment are carefully explored and genuinely involve the reader in the dilemmas faced by the characters: should David in book one believe Edward (no!), should Charlie in book three believe David (yes) and attempt to flee (not sure). etc? Book Two was the weakest in this respect: more and more I cared less and less. 

On the other hand, it sometimes felt that, as with her previous novel A Little Life, Yanagihara's character are drawn from a tiny subsection of humanity. Although the principals (David, David and Charlie) are gentle, weak, powerless characters, they are all privileged being born into either rich or royal or powerful families. And their milieu is equally drawn from the higher echelons of society: rich and powerful and cultured. Almost everyone is handsome. Their challenges are the challenges of the lucky. Does Yanagihara not know any ordinary folk?

There are moments of perfect description and other moments when Yanagihara can succinctly nail aspects of the human condition. But fundamentally I was alienated by the formal tricks, by the first world problems, by the lack of resolution and by the sheer bulk of the book. 

Selected quotes:

Moments of perfect description:

• "The man’s head was tipped back on his neck, which was long but supple and strong, like a snake, and as he sang, David watched a muscle move in his throat, a pearl traveling upward and then sliding down" ((Book 1, Washington Square, 4)
• "Around him, the world was impossibly vivid: the sky assaultively blue, the birds oppressively loud, the smell of horse manure, even in the cold, unpleasantly strong." (Book 1, Washington Square, 16)
• "they seemed made not from flesh but from something silty and cold. Not marble, but chalk." (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "on the wall opposite, a square of light flickers and vanishes, flickers and vanishes, flickers and vanishes, like a code meant only for me." (Book 3, Zone Eight, part 4)
• "what I hadn’t realized until everyone left is that the small, human sounds of this gathering, the sighs and snores and murmurs, the sharp flick of someone flipping the page of a book, the glug of water being swigged from a bottle, somehow balanced the other noise: the refrigerated trucks idling at the docks, the cottony thud of sheet-wrapped bodies being stacked atop one another, the boats chugging to and fro." (Book 3, Zone Eight, part 6)

Other great passages:

• "He felt at times as if his life were something he was only waiting to use up, so that, at the end of each day, he would settle into bed with a sigh, knowing he had worked through a small bit more of his existence and had moved another centimeter toward its natural conclusion." (Book 1, Washington Square, 2)
• "He was a bite of an apple, but Edward Bishop was that apple baked into a pie with a shattery, lardy crust pattered with sugar, and after a taste of that, there was no going back to the other." (Book 1, Washington Square, 4)
• "his leisure was so well-known that it had become its own kind of prison, a schedule in the absence of one." (Book 1, Washington Square, 5)
• "What would it be like to be someone anonymous, someone whose name meant nothing, who was able to move through life as a shadow?" (Book 1, Washington Square, 5)
• "His path was never his own to forge, for someone had already done it for him, clearing obstacles he would never know had once existed. He was free, but he was also not." ((Book 1, Washington Square, 5)
• "It was as if he had been bewitched and, knowing it, had sought not to fight against it but to surrender, to leave behind the world he thought he knew for another, and all because he wanted to attempt to be not the person he was—but the one he dreamed of being." (Book 1, Washington Square, 5)
• "Now it was time to seek. Now it was time to be brave. Now he must go alone." (Book 1, Washington Square, 16)
• "He could make his lack of knowledge—about flowers, baseball, football, modernist architecture, contemporary literature and art, South American food—sound like a boast; he didn’t know because there was no reason to know. You might know, but then you had wasted your time" (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1) A similar sentiment may be found in Washington Square by Henry James: "'Well, I never knew a foreigner!' said young Townsend, in a tone which seemed to indicate that his ignorance had been optional."
• "it sometimes felt as if he ... was an understudy, hurried onstage in the middle of a scene he couldn’t remember, trying to read his fellow actors’ cues, hopeful his lines would return to him." Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "he would listen in silence as they discussed things—people he had never heard of, books he had never read, movie stars he didn’t care about, events he hadn’t been alive for" (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "But he was also aware of feeling like a child. Charles chose his clothes and where they would vacation and what they would eat" (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "here was someone who allowed him to be the object of worry, never the worrier." (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "Preparing to be thirty, much less forty or fifty, was like buying furniture for a house made of sand—who knew when it would be washed away, or when it would start disintegrating, falling apart in clots? It was far better to use what money you could make proving to yourself that you were still alive." (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "To be hungry was to be alive, and to be alive was to need food." (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "Even his new grossness was a kind of shout, a defiance; he was a body that took up more space than was allowed, than was polite. He had made himself into a presence that couldn’t be ignored. He had made himself undeniable." (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "You should always have a close friend you’re slightly afraid of.” (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "the enjoyable things—eating, fucking, drinking, dancing, walking—falling away one by one, until all you were left with were the undignified motions and movements, the essence of what the body was: shitting and peeing and crying and bleeding, the body draining itself of liquids, like a river determined to run itself dry." (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "it was when you were dying that people most wanted things from you—they wanted you to remember, they wanted reassurance, they wanted forgiveness. They wanted acknowledgment and redemption;" (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "The problem, though, with trying to be the ideal anything is that eventually the definition changes, and you realize that what you’d been pursuing all along was not a single truth but a set of expectations determined by context. You leave that context, and you leave behind those expectations, too, and then you’re nothing once again." (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 2)
• "the government will do anything to delay confronting and correcting the actual problem: Americans’ scientific illiteracy." (Book 3, Zone Eight, part 2)
• “'With every person you see, you should try to notice five things,' Grandfather would say when I was struggling to describe someone. “What race are they? Are they tall or short? Are they fat or thin? Do they move quickly or slowly? Do they look down or straight ahead?" ((Book 3, Zone Eight, part 3)
• “Those who congratulate themselves on their sacrifices for their families aren’t actually sacrificing at all ... because their family is an extension of their selves, and therefore a manifestation of the ego. True selflessness ... meant giving of yourself to a stranger, someone whose life would never be entangled with your own." (Book 3, Zone Eight, part 8)
• "we are the left-behind, the dregs, the rats fighting for bits of rotten food, the people who chose to stay on earth, while those better and smarter than we are have left" (Book 3, Zone Eight, part 8)
• "when you’re twenty-four, your body is for pleasure and you’re constantly in love." (Book 3, Zone Eight, part 8)"
• "to the young, anything unpleasant can be blamed on or attributed to old age." (Book 3, Zone Eight, part 8)

Some great moments, showing considerable authorial skill, but its flaws make it a chore to read.

Oh, and it's about personal freedoms in the face of a pandemic. Like so many other recent fiction. Ho hum.

December 2023; 792 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God