Babel is a Brilliant Novel

Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution

By R. (Rebecca) F. Kuang

Harper Voyager, 2023, 549 pages.

★★★★★

 

 

What a fantastic book! And I mean this on several levels. R. F. Kuang is a fantastic writer and scholar. Babel is set at Oxford and there are some gratuitous pokes at Cambridge, but she has degrees from both places and is working on an East Asian language PhD at Yale. Yes, she's that kind of smart and a gifted novelist to boot. Babel is fantastic in that it's a mix of magical realism, imagination, and English society, a veritable alt.history of the 1830s. In such a novel, Kuang departs from what actually happened–parts of the novel feel like a darker adult version of Harry Potter­–but she's also fantastically confident. After noting some of the liberties she has taken, the last line of the forward is one of the best disclaimers ever: “If you find any other inconsistencies, feel free to remind yourself this is a work of fiction.”

 

The Radcliffe Camera of the Bodleian Library the likely model 

 

In the 1830s, robust England is in a throes of a silver industrial revolution. Britannia rules the waves, the global economy, and commands much of the world's wealth because it harnessed the secret of Ag. As you might know, silver has the highest potential for conductivity of any metal. That’s where Oxford comes into play, along with alchemy and abracadabra-like magic. University College–Britain's oldest–contains a domed eight-floor building whose top level is filled with silver bars that run or support everything from trains, carts, machines, sewage systems, bridges, building foundations, clocks, communications, and factories. Think parts of the 21st century transported to the 19th. For the bars to work, though, they must be activated by finding the correct pairings of words and engraving them onto the bars. They must be philologically compatible to work and mistakes can be volatile and dangerous. Hence, this task is left to translators who go to the roots of words, which requires extensive knowledge of ancient and foreign languages. Oxford, not coincidentally, has grown wealthy from its silver work.

 

The novel centers on the education of four students: Robin Swift, a Cantonese lad plucked from China as a boy and raised by Oxford don Robert Lovell; Ramiz “Rami” Mirza, an Indian Muslim; Victoire Desgraves, a black woman of Haitian heritage; and Letitia “Letty” Price,  a wealthy admiral's daughter who was only allowed to enter Oxford because her brother died. To some degree Robin can pass for white, but not Rami or Victoire and the latter, along with Letty, are women. Let’s just say that ethnocentrism,  racism, and sexism were not banished by silver bars! Each was trained from childhood for a stated destiny–success at Oxford–and a hidden one: service to British imperialism. As Kuang writes, most Babel students, “had nowhere in this country to go. They had been chosen for privileges they never could have imagined, funded by powerful and wealthy men whose motives they did not fully understand and they were acutely aware these could be lost at any moment.”

 

Read “trapped in a gilded cage” in that. Babel follows the four from their early giddy days of bonding as only outcasts can do, through their academic rigors and their awakenings. Their stories take place against a backdrop of what is about to happen: Queen Victoria's coronation, the suppression of worker movements, and the Opium Wars with a silver twist. The plot involves incantations, underground rebellions, personal revelations (especially for Robin), and veritable “which side are you on?” choices. All of those details are richly described and resolved in ways too delicious to reveal.

 

One of the more hackneyed ways to end a review is to say, “I'm sorry that this book had to end.” I mean it, though. This novel is intelligent, engaging, well plotted, thrilling, heartbreaking, and beautifully written. It is also a lesson in the interconnections between megalomania, social class, virulent nationalism, war, slavery, and racism. As its rather lengthy title suggests, it also probes several very old human conundrums, including the alluded logic behind the Biblical Babel and philosophical musings over what (if anything) justifies the use of violence. I would have gleefully read another 549 pages.

 

Rob Weir