Recent Reads: Babel by R.F. Kuang

Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford  Translators' Revolution by R.F. Kuang
Publisher:Harper
Publication Date:  August 23,2022

 

Format: Hardback
Source: Bought/Own

Rating:


Goodreads Synopsis: 

From award-winning author R.F. Kuang comes Babel, a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal retort to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British empire.

Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.

1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel.

Babel is the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver working—the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars—has made the British unparalleled in power, as its knowledge serves the Empire’s quest for colonization.

For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to stopping imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide…

Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence?

Review: 

Babel was an ambitious book at 542 pages. The author was well versed in the history and translation aspects that built the beautiful and ugly world that they characters lived in and some died in. 

The book follows a cast of characters, primarily Robin, a boy from Canton pulled to England by an elderly Englishman to learn language and translate for the Empire. In his pursuit of language, Robin is taken in by Babel, the institute of translation along with three others in his cohort, Ramy, Victoire, and Letty. This becomes more than a story of achievement for these students but instead a story of discrimination, violence, trade, slavery, and war. 

I left this book yelling and crying, so much so that my partner had to come check on me and tell me they were fictional characters, but a good book can do that to you. leave you devastated and sobbing for them. So, I ended on a love/hate relationship with this book. The plot as I mentioned was full of history, research, and facts interspersed with the magical silver that drives everything. It all felt so realistic, and the characters were so real as well, their struggles were mine as I read. They all grapple with their lives - the decision to be at Babel versus in their home countries and other impossible decisions as well. It became life and death for them, and you could feel the turmoil. 

To read this book, you will need empathy but also the understanding and nuance of history and how foreigners were perceived during this time period. They lived a life of privilege but from a distance, they were still deemed as ‘other’, and still prisoners of the Empire. The knowledge they held was kept and hoarded for monetary gain and that knowledge that was not theirs fully was power in this plotline.

It is difficult for me to fully explain this one, but if you like historical fiction, speculative fiction, and a diverse cast, this could be for you. It is a tome of a book, but so worth the history lesson you get and the immersion you will feel while reading it.