Babel — R.F. Kuang

R.F. Kuang's Babel arrives with a full subtitle: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution. It tells you almost everything you need to know about the book's ambitions and, to some extent, its limitations. This is a novel with an argument — about empire, translation, and the violence inherent in extractive systems — and it is not shy about making it.

The premise is elegant. In an alternate 1830s Oxford, a tower called Babel is the centre of Britain's imperial power, staffed by translators who work silver-work magic by exploiting the gap in meaning between words in different languages. Our protagonist, Robin Swift, is a Chinese boy brought to England by a professor, trained as a translator, and sent to Babel — where he slowly confronts the contradiction between his education and his identity.

What works

The world-building is meticulous and inventive. Kuang's treatment of translation as the engine of colonial power is genuinely interesting — the silver-work magic system is a beautiful metaphor for the way empires extract value from the cultures they colonise. The novel's Oxford is richly rendered, drawing on real history of the period while making clear that Oxford's beauty was built on violence.

The first half of the novel, in particular, is compelling. The friendships among the Babel cohort are warm and specific, and Kuang is skilled at showing how institutions seduce people into complicity by making them feel seen and valued.

What strains

The novel's argument — that colonialism is violent, that institutions built on exploitation cannot be reformed from within, that collaboration with empire implicates the collaborator — is correct. It is also stated, repeatedly and at length, by the characters in dialogue. Kuang trusts her readers less than she should. The metaphors and plot events do the work; the explicit editorialising is unnecessary and occasionally exhausting.