Babel, or The Necessity of Violence

It seems everyone either adores this book or loathes it. I might be one of the few who's firmly in between. I wouldn't call this book a masterpiece, it has some glaring flaws in its execution that unfortunately do bring down the overall quality, but I still found it an engaging read that at least attempts to give the readers something to think about.

Things I liked:

• The setting. Kuang wanted to milk the Dark Academia aesthetic, she did it masterfully, she built an excellent atmosphere and her descriptions of Oxford and college life are exactly what I was looking for. I also love how well the whole aesthetic gets brutally subverted at the end, and how the rot permeating the town (and by extension the academic world the characters have been immersed in) becomes more and more evident as the novel approaches its climax.
• The themes. I'm a sucker for a good revolution story, there's something incredibly liberating in seeing the oppressed rising up and giving a good ass kicking to their oppressors, or at least trying to do it. I feel Kuang did mostly a good job writing that specific part of the book. I also find it so very refreshing to see an author that is not afraid to state that violence might be necessary, in some circumstances, to affect lasting change and fight pervasive injustice, but at the same time is not afraid to show us the full consequences of said violence. War, no mater how righteous, is still a horrible thing; innocent people are going to die no matter how hard one tries to avoid it. Kuang doesn't shy away from this.                                                                                                                                  My heart also gave a little flutter when I found a quote from Les Misérables at the beginning of a chapter. I see what you did there Miss Kuang, and I like it. 
• The magic system. It might not have been incredibly developed, and as a metaphor for the industrial revolution it's maybe a bit simplistic, but the idea of generating power from the untranslatable meanings of words in different languages is quite original and very interesting.

Things I didn't like:

• The excessive telling instead of showing. Most of the characters are quite flat as a result. They don't read as true human beings with complex personalities. We're constantly told things about them, but we rarely see them act according to what we're told. Letty and Ramy suffer particularly from this. Ramy is supposed to be this witty, smart and decisive character loved by all, this is what we're told about him. We're shown very little about him, and what we're shown is a guy who's constantly angry. Not that he doesn't have excellent reasons to be angry, but “angry” cannot be a character's whole personality. Unfortunately, Ramy feels more like a racism detector than an actual person. Letty is the other character who suffers from this “cardboard figure syndrome”. Letty is supposed to be a well intentioned, well meaning white person who isn't overtly racist, and can even be nice towards people of colour, but is so entrenched in her privilege, so ignorant, blind and unwilling to doubt her worldview, that ends up perpetuating the violence of the colonial system all the same. The problem here is not that she's written like this, I would have loved a character like this; the problem is that, again, we're told she's nice, caring and friendly, if stubborn and ignorant, but every time she opens her mouth she's either unpleasant, or the author proceeds to bash her, to the point that she becomes a caricature of the kind of person she's supposed to represent. More than once I just asked myself why the hell the other characters were friends with her. 
• The lack of trust in the reader. Kuang seems very preoccupied with making sure her message gets across, as a result, parts of this novel feel very didactic, repetitive, and overall just insulting towards the intelligence of the reader. The message is just not delivered very elegantly, there's no subtlety or balance. Unfortunately, while the lack of subtlety wouldn't be a problem for a YA novel or an essay, in a novel meant for adults it just reads like bad writing. The footnotes in particular add absolutely unnecessary extra commentary, they take the reader out of the story to state things that should hopefully be obvious to any person of normal intelligence and culture. One could argue that it wasn't the author's intent to be elegant or subtle, that she wanted to punch the reader in the gut and make them feel uneasy, but again, i feel this kind of aim, in a novel, should be pursued through plot points and character interactions, not through footnotes and endless narrator commentary.