Babel, or The Necessity of Violence

I can't believe this didn't win Goodread's Fantasy Award for 2022 because I absolutely loved this book. I have to be upfront and say that I can't be objective about it, there's too much overlap with my life, I have my own Robyn, I'm bilingual and I work in a linguistic/translators capacity so this slid right in the pocket. Whether or not any of that is true for you, do yourself a favor and add it to your list; if you've had it on your shelf, make it your next read.

Set at Oxford during the leadup to the First Opium War (1830s/1840s), Babel: An Arcane History is a mashup of Fantasy and Historical fiction, a well-thought-out combo of Harry Potter and The Professor and the Madman. This is a book where magic silverwork has supplanted steam as the engine of the First Industrial Revolution, engraved silver serves as a medium to capture the meanings lost in translation. The translators of this universe are its sorcerers supreme, our main character Robin, and his cohort of multicultural fledgling translators are the next generation to unlock this power.

Babel: An Arcane History is a book with two faces, the characters of this story are indeed the miraculous chosen few, but they are also products of the horrors of colonialism, assets to their masters. Robin is uprooted from Canton and adopted by Professor Lovell; in exchange for his deliverance from poverty, he is strictly raised to exercise his language skills in the interest of the British crown. Robin is one of many children taken to England, once he grows up to attend Oxford (Read: Hogwarts) he meets Ramy, Victoire, and Letty (the only white European member of their cohort) a group of children from across the empire raised similarly to him. Almost immediately they are excluded by their privileged peers and come together as a group of their own. We join them as they choose between living lives in “naive, ignorant, luxury,” as tools of their oppressors, or risking their safety to resist the oppressive system.

The pointedly anti-colonialist message is mirrored by the efforts and attention directed at the majesty of language and the depth of its historical accuracy. Kuang elaborates beautifully on this period of history, it should come as no surprise but she really knows her stuff about this time period. It was difficult to tell where the worldbuilding ended and the historical facts began in some cases, and the in-universe footnotes took the immersive feelings I was having to the next level. There is also an expert's level of depth and understanding of language in this book, R.F. Kuang is a linguist in her own right and that's clearly on display. Whether it's a treatise and theory or simple fun facts (Did you know “very sad” in French is triste comme un repas sans fromage? sad like a meal without cheese) she's an in-universe expert too; it's refreshing to read about a magical world from a well-considered perspective.

At this point in my reviews, I try to list at least one flaw but for this novel, I only have a few observations and notes: Robin and his dormmate Ramy are both implied to be gay and attracted to each other. Since the story is told from the perspective of Robin, once we get to Oxford most of his attention is focused on his half-brother and Ramy. The rest of the main cohort is female, they barely register on Robins' radar and the novel suffers for it. In stories with similar setups, the romance between characters is the narrative vehicle for their backstory. The lack of romantic ties between our male and female characters kills off the de facto method of characterization for Letty and Victoire (at least early on). I can't believe I'm saying this but this story needed a much stronger love triangle!

Letty in particular gets poor treatment, very little of her character came across- she was little more than a well-meaning white friend. Letty is tragic in a sense, she experiences her own form of exclusion as she is a woman at Oxford in the 1830s and the campus is not hospitable to women. She's also excluded within her own cohort- she doesn't share in their differences and cannot accommodate their worldview. Given Letty's ultimate betrayal of the group, this token attribute of her character can make it seem like Kuang is painting with a broad brush. Given the importance of colonialism to the story, a lot of the depictions of the characters and their treatment within the story have some racial charge. Letty's betrayal seemed to be a critique of the complicity of all the white people who had a chance to stand against injustice but chose instead to sit aside or worse still, aid the forces of oppression for personal gain. I expected to see Letty transformed by her experience, but that subversion of expectation helped to amplify the central message of the story. I'm not sure how much of this interpretation is the conscious choice of the author or a byproduct of the narrative's structure.

TL;DR: Loved the crap out of it, definitely a must-read.