From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal retort to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British empire.
Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.
Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel.
Babel is the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver working—the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars—has made the British unparalleled in power, as its knowledge serves the Empire’s quest for colonization.
For Robin, Oxford is a …
From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal retort to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British empire.
Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.
Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel.
Babel is the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver working—the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars—has made the British unparalleled in power, as its knowledge serves the Empire’s quest for colonization.
For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to stopping imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide…
Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence?
A long, heavy, beautifully written and very biting book about the ways in which colonialism coopts people and institutions, and the simultaneous difficulty and necessity of resisting that. Deeply and cleverly tied in with real 19th Century history of Britain and its empire, while also being a fantasy story with a very specific magic system that I enjoyed in itself.
I highly recommend this book, but it should also come with some content warnings:
* Colonialism
* Lots of depictions of racism
* Abusive parenting
* Abusive academia
* Violence
* Not afraid to kill important characters
Content warning
I don't think I can review this without some vague spoilers
Babel is a story of colonialism, racism, sexism, whiteness, Englishness, loss, betrayal, and despair. It's basically a modern parable grittily illustrating the causes and consequences of colonialism.
I love the translation magic mechanism, and I found the embedded etymology tidbits super interesting.
I also appreciate that the author had the courage to allow Bad Things to happen to major characters - not in a GRRM torture porn kind of way, but just as a kind of natural consequence of the world and the characters' interactions.
What initially starts off as an imperfect blend of Tart's The Secret History and a low fantasy setting akin to Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell slowly shifts to its actual subject: colonialism. Seen through the lens, not of white saviours nor the faraway colonial subjects, but of it's unique product: people of both worlds, forcefully transplanted, with all the twisted allegiances that come with it. The last third act of the book explodes into a study about struggle and violence, the interwoven working of class and empire, in a way that is seldomly seen in (Western) fiction literature and for this fact alone this book deserves praise and commendation.
Kuang's story surprises. This coming-of-age (and coming-of-revolution) story introduces us to a world where the the 19th-century Industrial Revolution is made possible not by steam and worker oppression but by the magical powers of translation and colonial exploitation. The experiences of the protagonist, a Cantonese boy that adopts the English name Robin Swift, lead us to an imagined Oxford that is as intriguing as Hogwarts but that has sins that Kuang not only does not whitewash, but makes the centerpiece of her novel. The historical notes and especially the etymological explanations are fascinating, if occasionally pedantic. Once you get your head around this world and how it works, you'll want to hang on to the end to see how a postcolonial critique during the height of the British Empire can possibly turn out.
This memorable novel is both ingeniously creative and importantly timely in its message. R.F. Kuang weaves together a story that injects magical realism into a novel that is both historical and revisionist. That is, this is a story that asks us to imagine the road not taken at a certain time in history, and the ethics of the decisions of those in power–and question how and why such power came to be, in the first place.
I felt that the characters were well-developed and realistically complex, making it possible for the reader to feel the emotion in their stories. The plot was also well crafted and paced.
Instead of summarizing the plot, I want to simply recommend this novel, which I knew nothing about before I started reading. Part of the magic, for me, was simply reading on to discover the shape of the world as it is created by …
This memorable novel is both ingeniously creative and importantly timely in its message. R.F. Kuang weaves together a story that injects magical realism into a novel that is both historical and revisionist. That is, this is a story that asks us to imagine the road not taken at a certain time in history, and the ethics of the decisions of those in power–and question how and why such power came to be, in the first place.
I felt that the characters were well-developed and realistically complex, making it possible for the reader to feel the emotion in their stories. The plot was also well crafted and paced.
Instead of summarizing the plot, I want to simply recommend this novel, which I knew nothing about before I started reading. Part of the magic, for me, was simply reading on to discover the shape of the world as it is created by this author.
It was good, really good. The characters were interesting and three dimensional and enjoyable, the setting and plot was engaging and high stakes, and the translation lectures were tailor made for language nerds like me.
However, don’t do like I did and go into this expecting a fantasy novel. This is, mostly, historical fiction with a magic system reskinning technological progress in Victorian England.
This is not a knock on it, though, saying that it’s superfluous; it has a very interesting, if specific effect on the reader’s relationship with the world. It moves all of the varied goods and services that imperial Britain used to maintain power over their colonies into one spot and one profession: Oxford translators. As I see it, the silver magic system mostly exists to move the political center of Britain into this area. And I enjoyed it if only for this facet, if not for …
It was good, really good. The characters were interesting and three dimensional and enjoyable, the setting and plot was engaging and high stakes, and the translation lectures were tailor made for language nerds like me.
However, don’t do like I did and go into this expecting a fantasy novel. This is, mostly, historical fiction with a magic system reskinning technological progress in Victorian England.
This is not a knock on it, though, saying that it’s superfluous; it has a very interesting, if specific effect on the reader’s relationship with the world. It moves all of the varied goods and services that imperial Britain used to maintain power over their colonies into one spot and one profession: Oxford translators. As I see it, the silver magic system mostly exists to move the political center of Britain into this area. And I enjoyed it if only for this facet, if not for all the other symbolism it brings to the table.
However, I think it’s easy to be misled as a reader, that you will be seeing imaginative “what if?”s that are the bread and butter of alternate history fantasy novels.
To sum up, I recommend giving this novel a try if you are at all interested in Victorian England, in translation/linguistics, or just enjoy a really good, tragic, character driven story.
A magical alternative history of Oxford about the physical and cultural violence and slavery of empire and colonisation.
5 stars
Like #TedChiang's ‘Seventy Two Letters’, Babel is set in a fantastical alternative history of England during the Industrial Revolution. In Kuang's universe, the revolutionary tech is yínfúlù, silver talismans engraved with a word in one language and it's translation in another. When a bilingual utters the words, the subtle differences between their meanings are released by the silver, working magic on the physical world.
“The power of the bar lies in words. More specifically, the stuff of language the words are incapable of expressing - the stuff that gets lost when we move between one language and another. The silver catches what's lost and manifests it into being.”
Like in #UrsulaLeGuin's Earthsea, words have magical power, but also like Earthsea, the magic is taught to adepts in cloistered academies, in Kuang's case the Royal Institute of Translation. Translators are not only key to great leaps in productivity for British Industry, …
Like #TedChiang's ‘Seventy Two Letters’, Babel is set in a fantastical alternative history of England during the Industrial Revolution. In Kuang's universe, the revolutionary tech is yínfúlù, silver talismans engraved with a word in one language and it's translation in another. When a bilingual utters the words, the subtle differences between their meanings are released by the silver, working magic on the physical world.
“The power of the bar lies in words. More specifically, the stuff of language the words are incapable of expressing - the stuff that gets lost when we move between one language and another. The silver catches what's lost and manifests it into being.”
Like in #UrsulaLeGuin's Earthsea, words have magical power, but also like Earthsea, the magic is taught to adepts in cloistered academies, in Kuang's case the Royal Institute of Translation. Translators are not only key to great leaps in productivity for British Industry, but also at the nexus of Britain's project for empire and colonisation.
The empire's next target is China, and the novel opens with a boy, the only survivor of Asiatic Cholera in his Canton household, is rescued and cured with silver-work by a mysterious Englishman, Professor Lovell. The professor spirits the boy off to London, forcing him to choose an English name (Robin) and abandon his native Cantonese in favour of the more ‘useful’ Mandarin tongue.
Like #PhilipPullman's The Golden Compass, the hero is a youth of ambiguous parentage, growing up in an Oxford college, mentored by a distant, dismissive father figure.
He's brought up studying Latin and Greek, and afforded a ‘opportunity’ to enter the Royal Institute of Translation, with a small cohort of foreign-born multilinguals. Like the Le Guin's academy, the he finally finds recognition and love amongst his peers, and a long lost sense of belonging, a salve for his lifelong alienation.
Robin loves student life, but glossing over the underlying racism of Britain in general and Oxford in particular, and ignoring the growing realisation that silver-work is a tool for oppression in the colonies and a weapon of imperial expansion, become increasingly unsustainable. He realises the ‘opportunity’ is slavery wrapped in a false promise.
The novel's civilised beginnings are misleading. The tension, violence, and stakes rise inexorably amongst revelations about his origins, shadowy resistance groups, betrayal, excruciating torture, and sudden death.
Ostensibly about English colonial hegemony in centuries past, the novel has a lot to say about Silicon Valley's global imperial projects of similar magnitude, digital and linguistic sovereignty violated by today's magic: machine learning in general, and natural language processing in particular.
Kuang's 'Babel' is action packed, and also bristling with etymological curiosities and translation theory. I loved it not only because of its germane themes and because I'm a nerd linguist, but also because it was a great, heartrending adventure, with a great deal of resonance not only presumably for colonised people and immigrants everywhere, but anyone who's spent time bathed in alienation or crises of identity.
Some frustration with footnotes (both spotting the asterix and how Kuang was using them - particularly early on - but there was a moment of clarity later on… but then Chapter 31 happened?!?) and that the queer characters were killed off and never able to tell each other they were head-over-heels (and not in a tragedy style way either)… but otherwise really good.
I love translation and the thought that goes into it - much of which is covered here.
The way language is commoditized is a good allegory for imperial plunder. The central debate (violence or non-violence?) can also be applied to current affairs, like the fight for a livable planet.
