Book Review: “Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution” BY R.F. Kuang
Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution BY R.F. Kuang
Release Date: 1st September, 2022 Genre: Dark Academia / Historical Fantasy
This book left me with such a huge book hangover I don’t think I’ll ever fully recover. It firmly puts R.F. Kuang in the ‘great writers’ category, as if The Poppy War hadn’t shoved her very far towards that anyway. The point being, I’m not one who likes to tell people what they should or shouldn’t read, but I am here to say you need to read this book. It is truly excellent and if you’re on this site I honestly believe it will be right up your street or alley or whatever other type of pedestrian walking area you choose.
So, Babel – where to even start? How about with Robin Swift, our protagonist, orphaned in Canton and found by Professor Lovell, who whisks him off to London where he trains in various languages until he enrols in Oxford’s Royal Institute of Translation. Commonly and lovingly known as Babel, the institute is a core part of the sprawling, ever-growing British Empire, providing the magic for them to enact their violence around the world.
The second part of this title is incredibly important – The Necessity of Violence is something Robin struggles with throughout the book, torn between what he thinks is morally right, and the path his brother is travelling down. Robin is a tool of the empire, as are most of the characters we come across, the main difference is in how they react to it. Some believe pushing through legally is the right direction, wanting to spill as little blood as possible. On the other end, there are those who feel deaths are not a big price to pay to be free. There’s magic in this world, in the form of silver bars, and the magic system Kuang creates here is utterly fascinating, involving the marrying together of language and silver.
It's incredibly hard not to feel for Robin throughout this. We meet him when his mother is dying, and we see him go through so much. Robin doesn’t really want to give up his Babel lifestyle, charmed by the glittering gold, but throughout he still recognises what he has given up because of it, and what remaining part of it will mean. He very much wants to do the right thing, but struggles with what ‘the right thing’ truly is. He absorbs the experiences around him, and acknowledges the difficulties others face.
Kuang really touches on a lot of issues in this book, and shows how they intersect, even if the characters can’t always see that. Racism, sexism, the class system, the treatment of the Irish and Welsh (and their languages) by the English, where they’re very much seen as ‘lesser’ and not worth exploring. It’s a complicated web of issues at the heart of the British Empire, and Kuang never shies away from showing the brutality of it all.
Robin’s cohort is made up of four Babel students, each on their own journey, and really it’s the story of the friends, who deeply love each other, that sits at the heart of this. It’s the unspoken and spoken between them, the tension, the things they hide to protect each other – it’s the air that sits between two words in two different languages that, on the surface, look like they mean the same thing, but dig a little deeper and you’ll find the differences.
Oh, and the other thing about this book – an absolute dream for language lovers, with etymology on nearly every page, whether it’s used in the silver bars or the students discussing and debating translations.
I could rave about this book all day and probably will for a long time, but this book is truly both beautiful and brutal. It’s violent, and the violence is handled in a way that is impressively effective. It’s for sure a standout book of 2022, and I truly hope it gets all the recognition it deserves.
Review by Elle Turpitt
Twitter & Instagram: @elleturpitt
I received this ebook from HarperVoyager via NetGalley for review consideration.