REVIEW: Babel by R.F. Kuang
Full Title: "Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History"
Executive Summary: Babel follows the Cantonese boy, Robin Swift, through his childhood and adolescence in the care of Professor Lovell, a linguist at Oxford. Robin is hand-selected to train in language to participate in the rare, priceless art of silver-working. As Robin begins his college career at the prestigious Royal Institute of Translation (or Babel), he begins to learn the price of power gleaned through conquest. The central question of the novel: can the conquered gain freedom from the belly of the beast or must all revolution end in violence?
Star Rating: Five stars. I vacillated between four and five for too long - but I’ve landed on five. Kuang is 27 YEARS OLD and has already written the wildly successful Poppy War trilogy. She possesses three degrees and is studying for her fourth. This novel is a Dickensian feat of literature and linguistic research. It’s a well-executed, intellectual pondering on what it means to come of age as a third-culture child. AND THERE’S MAGIC. Truly, as I began reading, my first thought was “oh, this is Harry Potter for grown-ups.” (This is the highest praise that can come from me.)
Content Rating: I would classify this as PG16. There’s no sexual content, hardly any cursing. However, there are heavy themes. Colonization, racism, classism, statecraft, espionage, full-blown murder are rife throughout. It is not for children and it does not provide clean-cut, happy answers to life’s toughest questions.
Review: Holy sh*t. I loved this book.
If I could do it all over again - meaning my life - I would major in Linguistics. I would spend time learning multiple languages to fluency. I would then be an English teacher a la Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society. I would wear tweed, drink tea, and read for a meager pittance.
Babel would have been my paradise. The halcyon days for Robin and his cohort, early in their time at Oxford, are truly idyllic. Kuang captures the sense of infinity that pervades freshman year of college. When you’re that young and utterly unfettered, the world is your oyster.
However, she gets elbow-deep into what it means to weaponize the study of language. An old adage is “knowledge is power.” Another, more recent, adage is that “with great power comes great responsibility.” Under the myth (noun: a traditional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining some natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events) of the Tower of Babel comes the thesis of the story: the polyglots are the most powerful of us all and possess the ability to rule - or ruin - the world.
What would it mean for the world if all of mankind spoke the same language?
And if he cannot speak a universal tongue, what if he could command the power of all spoken word?
As I have previously mentioned, this story was designed in a lab specifically for my brain cells. The study of languages both dead and alive empowers the youth to perform the mythical (adjective: fictitious) task of silver-working. Engraving words in a silver bar allows the silver to capture the essence of what is lost in translation. These so-called “match pairs” allow trains to run faster, mills to operate without human oversight, and much more.
The power to imbue English society with this magic requires two things: languages that do not translate perfectly into English and silver.
[Now we take a brief aside for fun idioms that do not translate directly into English. See?! Language is NUTS. I love it. A review of The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker is imminent to this channel, I promise.]
I do not wish to spoil the joy of reading this book, so I will stop my plot analysis here. However, the main tension of the book arises when China begins to possess more silver than Britain and outlaws the teaching of Mandarin to anyone not native to China.
Note that this book is set post-American Revolution. Historically, this is the time that the sun did indeed begin to set on the British Empire. As Robin Swift comes of age in a time and place that was unkind to people from China, he begins to understand exactly what price an empire is willing to pay to maintain its power. The question for him: is he willing to pay it?
I cried, I laughed, and yes, I was absolutely shocked by some plot developments. Maybe hold off on reading this until the days are shorter and rain is more common. It feels weird to read dark academia in the dog days of summer.