Babel begins in 1829 in Canton, China. A plague of cholera has spread among the residents of Canton’s shantytowns, resulting in many fatalities. Babel’s main character, a young biracial orphan, is found at his mother’s deathbed by the wealthy English academic Professor Richard Lovell. The young boy is ill, but Lovell places a silver bar over his chest and recites the same word in French and English, performing a ritual that somehow halts the contagion from advancing any further within the boy’s immune system.

Lovell is vague regarding how he knew where to find the protagonist and his exact relationship to the child’s parents. He quizzes him about his fluency in English and Mandarin and produces another silver bar for the boy to read, an impromptu examination which he passes to Lovell’s satisfaction. Lovell proposes that the child accompany him back to England as his ward, on the condition that he dedicate his days towards rigorously studying Latin, Greek, and Mandarin in preparation for admission to the Royal Institute of Translation, more commonly known as Babel. Thinking of his survival, the young boy agrees to entrust his care to this cold and severe stranger. Lovell soon unceremoniously hands him papers to sign to certify the terms of his guardianship. He instructs the recently orphaned child to choose a new Anglican name for himself, but forbids him to take Lovell’s own name as his surname, lest someone mistake Lovell for his father. Left without a choice, the boy improvises the moniker Robin Swift. As Robin Swift, he sets sail for London, the “Silver City,” with Lovell and his Scottish housekeeper Mrs. Piper, departing from the only home he’d ever known to begin a new life in a strange land with the strange man now solely responsible for his welfare.

As Professor Lovell’s ward, Robin is involuntarily secluded from the outside world, scarcely stepping outside of Lovell’s country estate in Hampstead, and only ever interacting with his guardian, Mrs. Piper, and the tutor who drills Mandarin and the Classics into his weary mind. His time is strictly regimented and all of his days are consumed by the lesson plans dictated by his tutor and Lovell. He lacks playmates and is denied pastimes or anything that could be easily mistaken for a distraction, including leisure reading. He quickly pays the price for presuming to have autonomy over his time when Professor Lovell beats him for daring to skip a day’s lesson in favor of reading for pleasure. Robin’s only respite comes from talking to the kindly Mrs. Piper during meals, learning about Scottish and English culture from her, and sampling the baked goods she offers. One evening during a typical gathering of English noblemen, military men, and scholars in Professor Lovell’s salon, a guest lets slip something that Robin had long suspected: Professor Lovell is his biological father. Robin wants to, but shies away from broaching the subject of his true paternity with Lovell, instinctively knowing he would steadfastly deny it. Indeed, Lovell never bothers to discuss it with him. When the day that Robin is admitted to Babel finally arrives, Lovell is only prepared to ride to Oxford with him. He won’t acknowledge him as anything other than a Babel underclassman and his ward.  

And so, in the fall of 1836, Robin begins his studies at Oxford on a full-ride scholarship. Awestruck by the scale and splendor of Oxford and the formidable Babel edifice, Robin is both eager and nervous to attend his first lectures. Joining him are the three other members of his Babel cohort: Letitia “Letty Price, Victoire Desgraves, and Ramiz “Ramy” Mirza. Of this group of Babblers, all but Letty were born and/or raised abroad in British and French colonies, or countries in which Britain had established a trade dominion. Letty, the daughter of British aristocrats and the unintended Oxford replacement for her untimely deceased older brother, studies German and French. Victoire, a young Haitian-born French woman, studies French and Kreyól (Haitian Creole). Ramy, who is originally from Calcutta, studies Persian (Farsi), Arabic, and Urdu. As they adapt to their new surroundings, the four seek solace in one another’s company. They become fast friends, and even more, a found family. 

After Ramy and Robin have a run-in with a group of xenophobic British students on the way back to their dormitory one evening, Robin has a chance encounter with someone else much closer to kin than he’d imagined. He sees his doppelganger and doppelganger’s accomplices attempt to flee Babel’s tower with stolen silver bars. Robin stares at his lookalike, entranced and heedless of the sounds of a police constable’s imminent approach. The black-cloaked thieves struggle to conceal their presence with a silver bar that confers its users with invisibility by invoking the Chinese/English match-pair for “invisible.” Robin unquestioningly steps in to utter the Chinese half, allowing his doppelganger and co. to escape. Later, Robin’s doppelganger reaches out to him to arrange a face-to-face meeting. The doppelganger introduces himself as Griffin Harley Lovell, a member of the Hermes Society, a clandestine resistance organization set on redistributing Babel’s ill-begotten wealth and resources, and his half-brother. Like Robin, Griffin had been born in China and once matriculated at Babel as their father’s ward. He’d become disillusioned with life at Babel and the inequality that the work of its scholars helped to perpetuate. Griffin left the institute in his fourth year in 1834, by then already a Hermes Society operative. He now wanted to recruit Robin to use his insider privileges as a current Babel scholar to help the Hermes Society’s cause.

Over the course of his four years at Oxford, Robin grapples with questions of loyalty, justice, and identity, as his conscience and relationships are continually tested. The further he gets into his training in translations and silver-working and the deeper he goes into the Hermes Society, the greater the danger and earth-shattering implications of his every move.    

Babel is a magical, alternative vision of British colonial history that still feels timely and resonates with recent world events. In the novel, the craft of silver-working relies on capturing what is lost in translation. Robin and his counterparts study the etymologies of words in various languages and identify match-pairs and cognates to activate the power in tailored silver bars. Babel’s silver bars in turn end up powering everyday life in Oxford and London, as well as the ships, weapons, and machinery used to secure Britain’s trade interests and expansion abroad. Kuang levels a critique of imperialism and the transformation of language’s soft power into a brutal force underpinning the British Empire’s global expansion. Language and translation are simultaneously tools for cultivating community, ushering in cultural and technological advancements, and furthering understanding of the world and its peoples when used in good faith, and on the other hand, calculated tools for enacting violence and fostering inequity when not. The unfolding and adverse effects of the silver industrialization depicted in the novel recall the historical industrialization movement and seems to echo the unwanted byproducts of technological advancements in the modern day: the consolidation of wealth and resources in monopolies, the ever widening income gap, the obsolescence of certain trades, layoffs, food shortages, disenfranchisement of the poor, strikes, and labor unrest.

Composed of five parts (Books I-V), two interludes, and an epilogue, the breadth of historical and sociological references paired with the meticulous world-building results in a novel of epic proportions. The writing style is a fusion between the wordiness and floridity featured in early 19th-century British novels, the informative nature of nonfiction, and the faster rhythms and dialogue of mysteries and suspense. The narrative flows interestingly between fantasy, action, crime, interpersonal, and geopolitical conflicts and a thoroughly researched account of linguistics and history. Scattered throughout the novel are asterisks that direct readers’ attention to endnotes, both explanatory historical notes and fictional in-world digressions. Most of the chapters are long, with some occasionally feeling overlong, particularly in the first half of the novel. 

Story is more character-focused than plot-driven for Books I-III and the pace is slow-moving until a pivotal moment involving Robin and his friends. Robin’s commitment to the Hermes Society is ambivalent at best for much of Books I-III and the narrative tends to drag with every mention of it. The reader disengages with the Hermes Society just as Robin appears to do. His limited comprehension of the Hermes Society’s purpose and impact and lack of clarity on his own motives for aiding the organization’s resistance efforts makes the Hermes Society initially seem insubstantial to the plot’s narrative stakes. However, when the turning point occurs around the first interlude, all of the unevenly deployed tension builds up to something greater and more gripping. As the stakes are dramatically raised, the tone shifts and the pacing becomes tighter in Book IV onwards. The tone switches from the flowery and academic abstractions that reflect the false security of Robin and his cohort’s early days at Oxford, to a more urgent and graver tone that emphasizes the tangible and personal dimension of Babel’s unsavory machinations in their lives and in their home countries. The violence, loss, and death is no longer theoretical but real and unignorable, and so the prose grows heavier as well.

With Babel, Kuang celebrates the intrinsic beauty and complexities of language and achieves a spectacularly rich, inventive, and thought-provoking construction. 

LOGLINE: In a darkly imaginative alternative history of 19th-century England, Robin Swift, a young orphan of Chinese descent, becomes the ward of an exacting British professor and trains to join the exclusive ranks of the alluring and mysterious translators of Oxford University’s Babel. As Robin gets further into his studies, he discovers that the rarefied world that he’s entered may not be as it seems. 

MOOD: Assiduously constructed, cerebral, and immersive. A study of translation and linguistics packaged in an alternative historical fantasy that lures readers in with the comforting aesthetic trappings of academia and jolts them with an interrogation of imperialism. 

TITLE: Babel, also Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution

AUTHOR: R. F. Kuang

GENRE: Historical Fiction/Fantasy, Alternative History, Dark Fantasy, Literary Fiction, Dark Academia

PUBLISHER: Harper Voyager, an imprint of HarperCollins

PUB DATE: 23 August 2022

LENGTH: 560 pages (hardcover)