Babel

A story about what makes an empire run is thrilling, although not surprising. Babel is a fantasy novel you can totally apply to the real world. Money, (modern) colonialism and slavery, wars ... all the tools of economic power. I also loved to learn about etymology and language in general. As one who reads a lot and loves to read it doesn't come as a huge surprise that magic lies in words.

The reason for my mediocre rating is the book itself. I like the way she writes but she uses a ton of footnotes. Some of them necessary, most of them not. those would have fitted in one way or another in the text itself. For me, the footnotes hindered the flow of reading so it was really hard - especially in the beginning of the book - to get "into the zone".

Especially the ebook version is awful since you are jumping back and forth. For that I preferred the paperback since it made it easier to stick to it.

It's a pity that the book only got interesting during the last third.

For a good chunk of it, it's a coming-of-age and "magic school" tale with a pinch of the chosen one narrative. The later gets subverted in a very interesting way. And soon there are more unexpected and emotional twists which lead to a confrontation with the imperialist and racist authorities. The magic system Kuang came up with is very original and intriguing. Often, with magic, language or the right words play a role but basing it on the power of translation seems quite unique. I loved all the in-depth discussion of language and translation. It inspired a friend and me to come up with our own word pairs and speculate about what those pairs would do. It's also one of the few fantasy stories that deals with how magic would be used in a capitalist society in a realistic manner. My only major point of critique is that the narrative is perhaps a bit too clear cut in the sense that the villains are very villainous and all the students of colour develop a modern understanding of racism and colonialism very quickly even though that would have been unlikely given the time and setting. The ending is very emotional and moving. I'd love another book set in the same world, preferably a sequel.

This memorable novel is both ingeniously creative and importantly timely in its message. R.F. Kuang weaves together a story that injects magical realism into a novel that is both historical and revisionist. That is, this is a story that asks us to imagine the road not taken at a certain time in history, and the ethics of the decisions of those in power–and question how and why such power came to be, in the first place.

I felt that the characters were well-developed and realistically complex, making it possible for the reader to feel the emotion in their stories. The plot was also well crafted and paced.

Instead of summarizing the plot, I want to simply recommend this novel, which I knew nothing about before I started reading. Part of the magic, for me, was simply reading on to discover the shape of the world as it is created by this author.

Bravo!

It was good, really good. The characters were interesting and three dimensional and enjoyable, the setting and plot was engaging and high stakes, and the translation lectures were tailor made for language nerds like me.

However, don’t do like I did and go into this expecting a fantasy novel. This is, mostly, historical fiction with a magic system reskinning technological progress in Victorian England.

This is not a knock on it, though, saying that it’s superfluous; it has a very interesting, if specific effect on the reader’s relationship with the world. It moves all of the varied goods and services that imperial Britain used to maintain power over their colonies into one spot and one profession: Oxford translators. As I see it, the silver magic system mostly exists to move the political center of Britain into this area. And I enjoyed it if only for this facet, if not for all the other symbolism it brings to the table.

However, I think it’s easy to be misled as a reader, that you will be seeing imaginative “what if?”s that are the bread and butter of alternate history fantasy novels.

To sum up, I recommend giving this novel a try if you are at all interested in Victorian England, in translation/linguistics, or just enjoy a really good, tragic, character driven story.

Like #TedChiang's ‘Seventy Two Letters’, Babel is set in a fantastical alternative history of England during the Industrial Revolution. In Kuang's universe, the revolutionary tech is yínfúlù, silver talismans engraved with a word in one language and it's translation in another. When a bilingual utters the words, the subtle differences between their meanings are released by the silver, working magic on the physical world. “The power of the bar lies in words. More specifically, the stuff of language the words are incapable of expressing - the stuff that gets lost when we move between one language and another. The silver catches what's lost and manifests it into being.” Like in #UrsulaLeGuin's Earthsea, words have magical power, but also like Earthsea, the magic is taught to adepts in cloistered academies, in Kuang's case the Royal Institute of Translation. Translators are not only key to great leaps in productivity for British Industry, but also at the nexus of Britain's project for empire and colonisation. The empire's next target is China, and the novel opens with a boy, the only survivor of Asiatic Cholera in his Canton household, is rescued and cured with silver-work by a mysterious Englishman, Professor Lovell. The professor spirits the boy off to London, forcing him to choose an English name (Robin) and abandon his native Cantonese in favour of the more ‘useful’ Mandarin tongue. Like #PhilipPullman's The Golden Compass, the hero is a youth of ambiguous parentage, growing up in an Oxford college, mentored by a distant, dismissive father figure. He's brought up studying Latin and Greek, and afforded a ‘opportunity’ to enter the Royal Institute of Translation, with a small cohort of foreign-born multilinguals. Like the Le Guin's academy, the he finally finds recognition and love amongst his peers, and a long lost sense of belonging, a salve for his lifelong alienation. Robin loves student life, but glossing over the underlying racism of Britain in general and Oxford in particular, and ignoring the growing realisation that silver-work is a tool for oppression in the colonies and a weapon of imperial expansion, become increasingly unsustainable. He realises the ‘opportunity’ is slavery wrapped in a false promise. The novel's civilised beginnings are misleading. The tension, violence, and stakes rise inexorably amongst revelations about his origins, shadowy resistance groups, betrayal, excruciating torture, and sudden death. Ostensibly about English colonial hegemony in centuries past, the novel has a lot to say about Silicon Valley's global imperial projects of similar magnitude, digital and linguistic sovereignty violated by today's magic: machine learning in general, and natural language processing in particular. Kuang's 'Babel' is action packed, and also bristling with etymological curiosities and translation theory. I loved it not only because of its germane themes and because I'm a nerd linguist, but also because it was a great, heartrending adventure, with a great deal of resonance not only presumably for colonised people and immigrants everywhere, but anyone who's spent time bathed in alienation or crises of identity.