Thank you to Harper Voyager for sending me an advance copy of Babel for review!
After Robin lost his entire family to cholera, the mysterious Professor Lovell brings him all the way from China to London. The professor raises Robin as a scholar, training him in English, Latin, Ancient Greek and Chinese to prepare him for Oxford’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation, or Babel. In addition to its role as the world’s center of translation, it’s the hub for silver-working. Everything runs on magical silver, enchanted with “match-pairs” of words and phrases in different languages that advance society beyond belief.
At first, Robin is blown away by the city, the university and the first friends he’s ever had. Soon, however, his loyalties and morality are put to the test when he meets the shadowy Hermes Society. Dedicated to sabotaging Babel and silver-working in its entirety, the Hermes Society alters Robin’s view of his new world drastically. Robin must decide whether to remain in his comfortable life pursuing knowledge or take down the system that controls the entire world.
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I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Babel for the last two months. The second I finished it, I wanted to start again. This is an ambitious novel that addresses colonialism, imperialism, racism and sexism. R.F. Kuang takes a scathing look at the British Empire and establishes them as the villains of the story quickly and without ambiguity.
While other characters constantly tell Robin to appreciate what Professor Lovell and England did by bringing him out of poverty, he understands early on he’s being used for his mother tongue and the translation skills it allows him. However, as the tagline states, “an act of translation is always an act of betrayal,” and ultimately, the Empire takes more from Robin and his homeland than it gives back.
You know from the novel’s subtitle — The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution — that Babel is going to be a complicated and dark story. Kuang’s exploration of colonialism and language is nuanced. Her exploration of the supposed gratitude colonies should owe the British Empire versus the damage done to them hits hard. Magic and language are resources to extract from the poor and this exploitation simply increases. Robin’s rage builds steadily the more he learns, and the readers grow along with it.
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While I’m a huge fan of dark academia, I don’t think Babel quite falls into that category. The characters are similarly obsessive and academically driven to those in a book like The Secret History. However, Babel reads more like a response to Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, another alternate magical history set in 19th-century England. Babel addresses imperialism’s impact on the wider world in a way the latter doesn’t. In doing so it makes a stronger point about, as Kuang says, “the brokenness of academia, and the sacrifices that true change might require.”
Ultimately, Babel is a stylistic and heavy tale about identity, revolution, and, as the title says, “the necessity of violence.” Read it if you’re ready to feel rage and tackle empires. Babel comes out on August 23, 2022, and is available for preorder now from your local independent bookstore and Bookshop.org.
TW: abuse, colonialism, death of a parent, explicit racism, violence, major character death, mention of slavery, sexism, suicidal ideation, torture, violence toward children
This book review was originally published on 8/23/22.
https://www.geekgirlauthority.com/international-womens-day-female-genre-writers/
This review was originally published on 8/19/2022.
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