Published in 2022, this is by Rebecca F. Kuang, whose Yellowface I very much enjoyed earlier this year.

Babel has a plethora of supplementary descriptors. On the cover it keeps to a modest subtitle: An Arcane History. Inside, however, we have one of those old-fashioned alternative titles (Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence), plus an expanded subtitle: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution.

This was a very clever book, and I enjoyed reading it. How could I not like a book about translation and academia and outsiderdom and the evils of empire? These things are my life themes...



It's not a genre I'm familiar with, though. The Author's Note at the beginning says: "Babel is a work of speculative fiction and so takes place in a fantastical version of Oxford in the 1830s..."

I'm struggling to think of another novel I've read that falls into the "historical fantasy" category, and as for "dark academia" (another genre that commentators ascribe it to), well, I had to look it up... Which is odd, really, given my own decidedly dark views of academia...

So, I guess I'm not really au fait with the conventions, and I kept stumbling over my sense of inappropriateness and anachronism. I know it's fantasy, but there wouldn't have been women at Oxford in the 1830s. Let alone black women. Or black men, come to that. Or Asian men. And men and women wouldn't have mixed in that way. And the tone felt all wrong.

I kept having to remind myself: It's fantasy, it's fantasy; it's an invented world; it's not supposed to be real. But always having to remind yourself of something does get in the way of your enjoyment somewhat.


Guangzhou, 2018. Which used to be called Canton...

Anyway, having got that out of the way, what's to like?

Well, it revolves around an interesting construct. The pseudonymous Robin Swift (we never learn his real name) is taken from his home in Canton (where his Chinese family have all died of some horrible sickness) by Richard Lovell, a British academic who we soon learn is Robin's father. The boy is given rigorous language training, and eventually sent off to become a student at the Royal Institute of Translation (aka Babel) at Oxford University (where Lovell works). Here, in the huge tower that houses all this linguistic activity, Robin meets and bonds with a very disparate cohort: Ramy from India, Victoire from Haiti, and white, British-upper-class Letty.

They're all there for their language skills (and this is the element that allows you to overlook the unlikelihood of their presence). The British empire of Kuang's narration, you see, is powered by silver. Not just the material silver. Rather, a magic version of silver that is linguistically charged. Silver bars, it is explained, can be enchanted with what are called "match pairs" (words in two different languages that express similar but not identical concepts).

In the words of another of the professors, who is inducting the students into the mystery of silver: "The power of the bar lies in words. More specifically, the stuff of language that words are incapable of expressing -- the stuff that gets lost when we move between one language and another. The silver catches what's lost and manifests it into being... The core principle underlying silver-working is untranslatability... Because translation can never be perfect, the necessary distortions -- the meanings lost or warped in the journey -- are caught, and then manifested by the silver... We capture what is lost in translation -- for there is always something lost in translation -- and the bar manifests it into being."

So, depending on the lexical area, silver bars imbued with the relevant match pairs can make transport faster, structures stronger, and weapons more accurate; they can cure diseases, disseminate information, empower machinery, or make people disappear.

It's an ingenious concept, and Kuang gives enough examples to keep linguistic nerds like me very happy.



In fact, one of the things I liked about this book was its blatantly wonkish quality. I loved the immense "footnotes", adding all sorts of historical detail. I liked Kuang's willingness to discuss concepts.

Translation, for example: "Do we take words as our unit of translation, or do we subordinate accuracy of individual words to the overall spirit of the text?... Translators do not so much deliver a message as they rewrite the original... Distortion is inevitable... Do we try our hardest, as translators, to render ourselves invisible? Or do we remind our reader that what they are reading was not written in their native language?" An act of translation, we are reminded, is always an act of betrayal...

Kuang grew up in Texas, having moved there from Guangzhou with her family at the age of four. She grew up bilingual, and has worked as a translator, so she knows what she's talking about.

Our students struggle with their status as outsiders, regularly suffering the "indescribable humiliations" that go with "being in a place they were not supposed to be" (and I don't think you have to have a different ethnicity or religion to feel odd-person-out at an academic institution -- age or class will exclude you just as excruciatingly). And the differences in their experience of marginalization are well handled (how "different" you look, for example, and your gender, will play into the kind of reception you get from the mainstream -- as will your own personality, and your individual decision as to where to position yourself on the assimilation spectrum).

Despite these trials, they're happy as students. They work very hard, but they love the esoteric environment, and thrive on intellectual challenges.



Until, that is, they start to realize the relationship between silver and politics... Silver drives the empire, so all their activity is propping up institutions and persons who are already powerful. Silver also powers the industrial revolution, slicing through social and economic structures, and upending the lives of workers. As the students begin to come to terms with all this, they start to be influenced by an underground resistance movement.

One of the leading lights in this pushback organization is Robin's half-brother, Griffin (it seems their father has specialized in siring young Chinese children, precisely for the purpose of coopting them into politically useful translation activity). As this young rebel puts it: "The professors like to pretend that the tower is a refuge for pure knowledge, that it sits above the mundane concerns of business and commerce, but it does not. It's intricately tied to the business of colonialism. It IS the business of colonialism."

Anyone who has studied politics is familiar, of course, with the nexus of knowledge and power. But it's nice to see it form part of a fantasy novel, reaching many different minds in the process. From the mundane -- footnotes, for example: "Non-European texts, Griffin found, tended to be loaded down with an astonishing amount of explanatory context, to the effect that the text was never read as a work on its own, but always through the guided lens of the (white, European) translator" -- to the military (the British want to stop their supplies of silver ending up in China by forcing the Chinese to spend silver on importing opium), knowledge is unfailingly serving imperial goals (and there's nothing fictional about either of those examples, of course).

As the students find themselves butting up more and more against the powers-that-be that have set up the system, the novel starts to sound very contemporary: "It sank in now that the forces they were playing with were actually quite terrifying, that the trading companies and political lobbies they were attempting to manipulate were not the laughable bogeymen they'd made them out to be but incredibly powerful organizations with deep, entrenched interests in the colonial trade, interests they would murder to protect."

It's not easy to take up arms against the system -- any more than it is for those of us who live very comfortably in this world to do anything meaningful to correct its injustices. At first inertia wins out: "[Robin] could not resolve the contradiction of his willingness to thrive at Babel even as it became clearer, day by day, how obviously unjust were the foundations of its fortunes."

Eventually, though, Robin and some of the others move into full-on opposition: "The dream [of belonging] was shattered. That dream had always been founded on a lie. None of them had ever stood a chance of truly belonging here, for Oxford wanted only one kind of scholar, the kind born and bred to cycle through posts of power it had created for itself. Everyone else it chewed up and discarded."

I won't divulge where this opposition leads them. But it's a battle royal...



It's Robin's character that is drawn in the most detail. Natasha Pulley sums him up very well: "Swift is a complicated man. Born into poverty in China but raised by a wealthy father in England, he embodies all kinds of contradictions. On one hand, he’s an overprivileged, middle-class Hamletty brat whose headaches are always worse than anyone else’s. It comes as a revelation to him that working-class people have a hard time, because he doesn’t know any. But he is also brave, and noble, and endlessly willing to have his worst side policed by his friends. He’s a little boy who decides that his father’s housekeeper’s scones are 'the Platonic ideal of bread'. He’s a naive student so shocked by the unfairness of the world behind all his money and his university that he struggles to see how to live in it. Like a set of dangerous silver match pairs, these contradictions can never quite translate each other, and they have explosive results."

While Robin is drawn with considerable nuance, I think Lacy Baugher Milas is right to argue that the book's message as a whole comes across a bit like a cudgel to the skull: "While Babel trusts its audience to be able to wrestle with complex questions of linguistics and identity, the novel seems nervous that readers will not be able to fully grasp its themes of oppression and prejudice without help. So, rather than allow the horrors of its story (and the lies at the heart of the enterprise that is Babel) to speak for themselves, the narrative is frequently interrupted by long screeds about why imperialism is bad and the damage it can cause to people both living in occupied lands and the countries doing the conquering." (Alexis Yi has the same complaint.)

It's not fair to compare Babel with the masterful portrayals of the Opium Wars that we find in Amitav Ghosh's Ibis trilogy (I wrote about the last two volumes here and here), or in An Insular Possession by Timothy Mo. They are in a different league.

But Babel will introduce a complete different cohort of readers to the ongoing problems of Eurocentrism, and the challenges of equitable knowledge production. In today's environment, that can only be a good thing.