Babel by R. F. Kuang

Can brilliance ever be interesting?

When you’re, y’know, not brilliant but not awed by brilliance? When you’re an adult, like, living a like adult life?

Isn’t brilliance rather an uninteresting thing?

Isn’t being awed by brilliance a pedestrian, a tiresome, a pointless thing to do???

Unless unless unless…. one is brilliant, or one holds a belief or a hope or a a a a a faith in the inevitable revelation of later brilliance… it’s just not compelling, right?

Most of us are not brilliant.

I’m not, you’re almost certainly not (no offence if you are brilliant and you’re reading this by mistake and/or have a genuine interest in the thoughts of the unbrilliant), and there comes a point in life where fictional depictions of fictional brilliance feel flat, pointless, meaningless… Almost tired. Unimaginative. Uninteresting. Dull.

Unfortunately, though, R. F. Kuang is someone who is brilliant [in the usual sense], a bestselling novelist, a linguist and academic who’s studied all over the world at many of the world’s most brilliant institutions, who maintains both creative and intellectual practices to great acclaim and success in her mid-twenties. As well as Babel, last year Kuang also published Yellowface, which I haven’t read but have heard is excellent, biting, satirical, perfect (maybe also “brilliant” but maybe a little more grounded than that word implies?), and I’m sure is on track to release many many many more smash hit novels over the next few decades.

Thus, to criticise Kuang – who, one must presume,  is surrounded by other brilliant people to match her own brilliance – for this novel being populated by near wall-to-wall brilliance is perhaps not only reductive, but also potentially mean. And I’d hate to be accused of that.

This may be set in an alternative 1830s where basically like magic also exists, but it is set in a very real feeling version of a very real intellectual educational institution, and almost every single character who appears in the novel for more than a mere few pages or paragraphs is a scholar and an expert, a brilliant student or a brilliant professor, a cruel yet brilliant statesman or – the closest to not being brilliant – a working class yet brilliant union leader.

All this brilliance, yes…

Brilliance.

Everyone (basically) is a linguist, trained from birth (or shortly after birth following displays of innate linguistic brilliance) to be a great linguist, for the magic that exists in the novel is created by inscribing pairs of words from different languages onto silver bars, and the gap in meaning between the translations is then physically manifested. (I could try and give you an example from the book but there’s no point as I can either explain it in a sentence or I can’t: the magic is created through translation, and the inability for identical meanings to persist through differing linguistic expressions. You understand, right?)

Thus, then, is the Babel of the title, an Oxford University department dedicated to finding the most brilliant linguists of the world (and essentially trying to breed brilliant linguists in a sinister manner that Kuang doesn’t quite explore enough here imo) and helping to expand the knowledge of translation and thus the potential magic available to the then world-dominating British Empire.

The novel, then, follows the university career of a new cohort of students as they learn the skills involved in creating the magic silver bars and also continue to constantly learn new languages to ever expand the potential linguistic resources Babel demands…

There is lots about the rigours of education and studying and effort, and increasingly too there is loads about colonialism and this is where the writing becomes most engaging, exciting and important, though it does sometimes feel a little like great pieces of a non-fiction essay on the continued intricacies of economic exploitation have been cut up and placed as dialogue for various characters in a novel that – although enjoyable, compelling, and often engaging – feels a bit more like an attempt to rewrite and repackage the most universal elements of Harry Potter (England! Abusive childhood but great time at school! Fancy school! Blunt and uncomplex ideas of right and wrong, though one that’s not as old school and conservative as JK Rowling’s, thankfully) for an audience hungry for those nostalgic children’s literature elements but understandably keen to avoid the right wing shift of the author of that series…

And, also, there’s an absolutely bizarre sexlessness to the book here that makes it feel kinda unsettling… desire is implied but sex never is, which makes for a novel that feels restrained, repressed… one where this very much feels like the text itself rather than the characters… There’s something missing here, something that is lost when one focuses on brilliance rather than on humanity.

Because most of us aren’t brilliant. And this isn’t a book about people.

–//–

It is a great idea, though!

The exploitative use of language and translation itself being used to exacerbate and create additional power in the colonial sphere is absolutely a great metaphor, a great idea, a super interesting way to explore the use of languages within colonial control…

But that’s, ultimately, it…. This is an essay, an exploration, a great idea stretched to exceptional length at almost 600 pages…

This is a really top drawer short story that continues dangerously beyond its own limits.

The engraved silver bars and their magic is interesting, yes! But the fucking boarding school (slash high end old school university) high jinks are ultimately of little interest except for confused nostalgia driven Gen Zs and millennials who dream of Hogwarts-cum-Oxbridge yet fear reading about sex (let’s remember that if you’re already succumbing to nostalgia prior to the age of fucking forty you have fundamentally fucked your life up even more than I have, and I’m one of the most miserable people I know)…

I mean, this is making it sound like I hated Babel.

I didn’t, at all!

I just wish that it had either been only 100 pages long or it had begun with the epilogue (one of the students who survives the inevitable final battle type denouement (what do YOU think happens to the sinister tower named Babel used for sinister purposes in a novel about the dangers and risks of exploitation through language acquisition and cooption, ey?) is on the run in a hostile world (the novel ends with this character, a Black Haitian raised in France, as a stowaway on a ship heading to the then slavery-crazy United States of America) with a limited stack of silver bars left over for them to make magic with and a villainous figure on their trail) and gone on from there…

If there was a sequel, would I read it? Yes, absolutely, if it was under 300 pages and probably yes if it was longer but I received assurances that sex and desire are discussed with a realistic openness…

Yes. I enjoyed it.

But it’s fucking long, and the characters aren’t really distinct from each other enough to carry a novel, and though it is neat and well constructed and enjoyable, I think unless you’re picking it up to read in two or three full day sessions on a beach with a few beers/ice creams/intermittent swims/cocktails/sand dune dalliances, then I really can’t recommend it…

I had this with me on a brief holiday/trip back to Canada, reading a couple of hours every day, and it took me approx a full week to get through it. I imagine if one were reading this split across daily commutes it would end up getting tossed aside – this isn’t something to spend weeks of your life in…

–///–

Ahhh, I dunno.

Maybe I’m just being bitchy, overly critical, cruel…

Conscious of my own lack of brilliance and my failure to ever study hard and apply myself or whatever and lashing out…

Yeh, sure, let’s call it that …

I’m back in Toronto and it’s quite upsetting. Back from a London where – for the second time – I’ve failed to build a sustainable and tolerable life for myself, visiting a city where I also did that …

I ran away. Then went back to where I’d run away from. Whoops lol aha

Visiting again the place where I ran away to is strange… I made no life here. I mean, there was the pandemic, sure, ok, sure, yeah, ok, sure.

But that’s just making excuses, not making reasons.

I dunno.

If I was happier, maybe I would’ve enjoyed Babel more???

But I’m not happier. I’m not the most miserable I’ve ever been, I’m far from that.

But I’m not like “happy” innit…

England isn’t home. But I didn’t manage to make a home here either…

Will I ever be able to make one anywhere?

Who knows?

Who knows who knows who knows???

Keep on reading Triumph Of The Now to find out!!!!!!!

–///–

Ultimately, tho, what Kuang does here over 600 pages is what is done ten to twenty times in books like Bloodchild (Octavia Butler), Driftglass (Samuel Delaney) and The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (Ursula Le Guin)… an idea that is as good as Kuang’s is here isn’t enough for that page count.

People aren’t just ideas, people are bodies and feelings and emotions and regrets and dreams… Here they are ideas and anger only, pretty much, which is ironically the kind of old school colonialist small c conservative attitude that the narrative and the premise of this book is railing against…

–///–

Lines from Babel on colonialism that worked well (i.e. that I agreed with):

p. 499, spoken by the main character, Robin: “This is how colonialism works. It convinces you that the fallout from resistance is entirely our fault, that the immoral choice is resistance itself rather than the circumstances that demanded it.”

earlier in the book, spoken by Griffin, Robin’s mentor: “decolonisation must be a violent process”

p. 381, spoken by Anthony, a formerly enslaved student: “There are no kind masters […] It doesn’t matter how lenient, how gracious, how invested in your education they make out to be. Masters are masters in the end.”

–///–

Yeaaahh I dunno, overall.

Probably worth a read? Maybe not tho.

Meh.