Babel was all over social media for a while. The excitement seems to have died down. Perhaps because Yellowface came along to take its place. But excitement over that seems to have died down too. I let all the excitement die down before I read either of them! Actually that's not entirely true. I reserved Babel at my library. So I had to wait for a copy to become available. That indicated that it is still being widely read. The reservation lists for library books can be an interesting indicator of books that are in demand whether or not they are the current topic on social media.
Babel. It's not new. It's there in the book of Genesis. It apparently means confusion. Some believe it to be a myth to explain why different languages are spoken globally. Others think it is based an actual structures or that the Biblical story was inspired by one such structure, the ziggurat Etemenaki dedicated to the god, Marduk of Mesopotamia, patron of Babylon, interesting, as he is believed to encompass both good and evil, he can help humanity and he can also destroy people. The inference worked well within the context of Kuang's book.
The author herself avers that Babel is 'about infinite worlds of languages, cultures, and histories'. Indeed it is. I found it to be an ambitious work, erudite and scholarly, occasionally dry in places and perhaps overlong, but nonetheless highly impressive. We tend to think of fantasy fiction occupying imaginary worlds and landscapes or being set in a stylised future where we are allowed glimpses and small comparisons with our contemporary lives. Not so here. Kuang has cleverly set her fantasy in a Victorian Oxford deep within the industrial revolution and the advent of train travel. A task that sees the need for extensive historical research that will also fit into the fantasy world she creates where Babel is the pinnacle of Oxford intellect and silver bars and translation are the key to running the country efficiently (I use the term loosely 😉) and...... world domination? If Yellowface was a scathing satire on the publishing industry and social media, is this an equalling scathing satire on how dependent we are on money and connectivity? Maybe. But that's just a part of it.
Subtitled The Necessity of Violence Babel evokes a plethora of thought and emotions. It presents as a type of campus novel told primarily from the POV of Robin Swift an orphaned Cantonese boy plucked from his lowly origins to England to be moulded into an exemplary scholar destined for Oxford University and .......Babel. Identity is key for Robin and his fellow pupils who form a cohort as language students. To a degree they are all outsiders in this white world which both cements and fragments their relationships with each other. It is a story of paradoxes as Robin, particularly, wrestles with his place in the secure and privileged academic life enhanced by his position as a translator and the empirical, colonial world where the rich care little for anything but gain.
It is perhaps too complex a book to offer a succinct precis, for a great deal happens and I wouldn't want to give too much away. But I will say that I found the majority of characters hard to engage with. As people I could sympathise with their ideologies and understand their motivations but none of them were especially nice people except maybe Professor Craft who I quite liked. They are an intense group but I also think the reader needed to be kept at arms length emotionally in order to remain objective about the events.
It's a clever and intelligent book. The weaving of historical fiction with fantasy is masterful and poses numerous notions for the reader to consider. Like all literary fiction there's room for individual considerations and musings. It's a treasure trove for word lovers and linguists. As I read I found myself thinking of Les Miserables, perhaps it was the barricades, but maybe it's that idealism where people actually believe they can change the world for the better. And I thought of Donna Tartt and The Secret History. I also thought of Genesis 11 and the significance to this book and our current world. I found my thoughts overflowing. But the Tower of Babel fell. The end.
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