Babel, or The Necessity of Violence

BABEL is a tale of violent revolution.

It was a real page-turner, keeping me intrigued throughout. Shades of THE SECRET HISTORY kept me entertained at the start, until it turned into more of a blatant tale of revolution, sometimes going ways I couldn't really accept story-wise.

There is some good prose here (certainly far better than the POPPY WAR trilogy), and I love the things it says about language, etymology, and translation, but I thought the meat of the story was rather flat.

The actual narrative of oppression and (de-)colonization is a very one-note Twitter-esque “imperalism bad” that feels at complete odds with the actual story. It's unsubtle. It's repetitious. It doesn't feel natural. Especially near the end it started to feel like more and more moments were undeserved because of this.

In the end, it's an ambitious and certainly entertaining novel that feels a bit too self-aware and never manages to fully sell me.