"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

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