R. F. Kuang had a hit with The Poppy War trilogy (2018-2020), which metaphorically reimagined the Opium War as a historical fantasy of magic and war. In Babel, she brings Opium War history closer to home, portraying an alternate 1830s Oxford in which the steam power of the nineteenth-century British Empire is made efficient by silver magically transformed by multilingual engravings. Selling Indian opium to the Chinese for the silver they need powers the British economy.

The engravings are made by translators who still dream in both languages. Oxford University has built Babel, a tower where magical translation is taught and carried out. A professor at the University transports his unacknowledged Chinese son from Canton to England. The boy, who becomes known by the name Robin Swift, is groomed to be a silver-working translator. His racist father cannot understand why he is not completely assimilated into English culture, where he faces daily discrimination.

The story is gripping, and the characters of Robin and his cohorts are especially well-drawn. Reading the book for the second time, I am more impressed than ever with Kuang’s control of her style and narrative structure.

Se lleva 4 estrellas porque el sistema de magia me ha gustado mucho y porque, sobre todo la primera parte, me ha parecido muy bella con toda la parte académica.

Pero el libro tiene varios fallos que hacen que no pueda ponerle 5… y que sinceramente me hacen plantearme si no debieran ser más bien 3.

1. Entiendo que la motivación del libro era plantear las encrucijadas del racismo y sus antecedentes históricos más próximos. Pero ¿todo personaje blanco tiene que ser malísimo y egoísta y todo personaje racializado, no solo buena persona, sino valiente y generoso?

Llegó un punto tan exagerado que era más bien cómico. Los únicos personajes blancos que se salvaban de la criba eran, en realidad, cómplices racistas y culpables por otras cosa. 2 mujeres y un obrero pobre, no fuera ser…

2. El hecho de tener magia… no cambia en nada el devenir de Inglaterra. Me gusta la parte histórica, pero que se consiga exactamente lo mismo que efectivamente se consiguió es un poco flojo. El único cambio es que los coches de caballos nunca tienen accidentes…

3. El libro tenía que haber sido una bilogía y reducir un poco la paja. Porque es largo pero parece innecesariamente largo para lo que cuenta.

La parte de tratado académico no me echó para atrás y de verdad que la disfruté. Pero en el último tercio los personajes me daban un poco igual. La traición me dio igual, la muerte me dio igual… la verdad es que no les tenía nada de cariño.

The only positive part of this experience was reading the novel on my Kindle instead of buying the printed book – imagine carting around 500 pages plus the massive chip on the author’s shoulder! The negatives are almost as long as the footnotes. This is a nasty, bitter, patronising and oh so American bloated exercise in ego; I’m too old for BookTok, but I should know from previous experience to avoid a ‘Sunday Times bestseller’.

The history in which the fantasy plot is grounded is interesting and still important, but the author reduces colonialism and the British Empire to ‘white men are evil, people of colour are victims’ and mercilessly beats the reader over the head with her simplistic and modern perspective. She leans on actual historical events to the point of lecturing but also picks and chooses what information to include – for example, omitting that the United States also traded opium in China and inferring that the drug was banned in England while the British were ‘forcing opium on the Chinese at gunpoint.' Her take on history is literally black and white, with no shades of grey and no nuance.

The characters are equally flimsy, and the narrative is merely the 12” remix of ‘CoLoNiSeR!’ comments on X or, more likely considering the demographic, Tumblr. Robin, the half-Chinese main character, is little more than a more than a Watson figure used by the author to expound on her tedious and repetitive attack on British history. Ramy is Indian, show more Victoire is Afro-Caribbean and Letty is the coloniser in their midst (‘Proud, proper Letty with her stiff upper lip represented everything Ramy disdained about the English’). All they have in common – apart from Letty – is not being English. To fit in with the dystopian YA fiction vibe that makes this book so popular on TikTok and Tumblr, however, we are told that they are a found family : ‘By the time they’d finished their tea, they were almost in love with each other – not quite yet, because true love took time and memories, but as close to love as first impressions could take them.’ In fact, the whole novel is a masterclass in tell, don’t show, or instruction over implication. The exposition is often more absorbing than the plot, especially the etymology, but for the most part, the writing is more like a Wikipedia article (which requires sources) than fiction.

The plot veers between Dark Academia and a distorted revision of history, set in the 1830s but from a modern perspective – until very recently, ‘coloniser’ was the word for the people who lived in the colonies, but Kuang uses the term in the negative to mean ‘evil white people’ (the ‘British’ (English) are almost literally moustache-twirling pantomime villains). The dialogue is equally anachronistic, like a retelling of The Secret History but with corsets and carriages. If Kuang was smarter than she thinks, there could have been an element of dark humour and pastiche (‘DRUGGY MCDRUGGY WANTS HIS THUMBS IN CHINA’), but the author takes herself way too seriously.

I did appreciate the fantasy element of turning silver bullion into silver bars with magical properties, imbued with the meaning of words that can be lost in translation between languages, but Kuang doesn’t give the fantasy element enough space in between all the historical browbeating. And I disagree with the linguistic message of Babel – language isn’t a national treasury to be plundered by invading countries; new words and meanings are both coined and ‘borrowed’ and that’s how vocabulary grows and evolves. I was piqued into research by some of the topics raised in Kuang’s novel (the First Opium War, for instance), but found the reality far more fascinating than her reductive interpretation. ‘If you find any other inconsistencies, feel free to remind yourself this is a work of fiction,’ the author snarks in her introduction, and true, in a work of fiction, you can play with dates and inventions and have useless postgrads saving the world from the ‘frightening web of the colonial empire’, but this is a poor work of fiction, with characters I didn’t believe in or care about, excessive ranting, and a plot that boiled over from the author’s grudge against Oxford into a reworking of Les Miserables.

Babel reminded me of the classics and literature I had to study in my school days. Yes, there was a lot of noteworthy ideas and discussions to be had but by god was it a challenge to get through.

First off, the person who wrote the marketing tagline, "for fans of The Poppy War" needs to be fired from their job. This is nothing like The Poppy War. The latter was an epic military fantasy war story while the former is an literary fiction-esque urban fantasy. Going into Babel expecting something reminiscent of The Poppy War will just ruin the entire book for you. That being said, even if I had gone in with correct expectations, I doubt my opinions would have changed all that much.

Let's start with my first problem: NOTHING HAPPENS IN THIS BOOK. Well, ok, that's not completely true, there is a lot of plot progression and activity in the last 100 or so pages of the book. But the effort needed to get to that point was really taxing. Yes the writing is very pretty. And yes the magic system is incredibly inventive. And yes the atmosphere is enticing but without a strong cohesive narrative tying it all together there's just nothing for me to latch on to. I kept reading and waiting for the plot to go somewhere but ultimately it never did. But a lack of a plot doesn't inherently mean a book is bad right? A lot of people don't mind reading a "no plot, just vibes" book if the characters are compelling. So, are they compelling? Well...

The characters (and the world as a whole) just lacked any complexity or depth. I actually laughed when I saw a review that said Babel has "a brilliant presentation of the found family trope". That's completely wrong. These characters are not a found family. A found family indicates a level of trust, rapport, and devotion. Here, the characters keep things from each other, they never listen to one another, and every time we do see them talking to each other it always devolves into an argument.

But by far the biggest issue here was Letty. At no point did she feel like a real person. It was SO EVIDENT that she was just a mouthpiece for the author to get her beliefs across. She's a woman which means she has some struggles in academia, but she's white which means she avoids the struggles that non white women face (so you can tell that the author has heard of the word intersectionality). She uses her experiences with sexism to guilt trip others into accepting her demands but also isn't aware of the privilege she has. The narrative CONSTANTLY tells us that she's a racist and an ignoramus but it never actually shows her doing any of these things, which makes it extremely jarring when others accuse her of being bigoted, since there was no build up to it.

This is just the gist of the description and not an actual quote, but in one moment she would be described as "someone who makes a few off hand comments here and there but ultimately a kind soul" and then a hundred pages later Victoire and Ramy would be screaming at her about how she was unaware of their struggles with racism.

She was also just a weird character in general, at one point she discovers the others have been keeping a HUGE secret from her and I expected there to be some big blowout and argument... But instead she just doesn't say anything and immediately forgives them. If I learned that my close friends we're keeping such a secret from me, I would've said goodbye and broken all contact with them. On a pure narrative level, I can kinda understand Letty's actions and beliefs but I ultimately can't fully appreciate them because it was so evident what the author was trying to do and I couldn't read about her without feeling like R. F. Kuang was breathing down my neck.

In fact this is a big issue with all the characters in general, it felt like they were written around a single defining characteristic rather than being given space for something more. Here are all the characters summed up: Robin is the one who struggles with his biracial identity, Ramy is the one who hates the British, Victoire is the one who suffers so we can see the cruelty of colonialism, Letty is the one who's a privileged white woman and Lovell is the one who's a racist AND a hypocrite. They're never given any dimension outside of this one attribute and it just starts to wear you down.

With regard to the world, there was, once again, a complete lack of any kind of nuance or complexity. Without (trying to) spoil much, there is a war about to happen between two countries and all the people in the aggressor country are portrayed as evil, heartless, and cruel, while all the people in the victim country are shown as innocent, virtuous, and pure. I'm not saying that all countries are heartless or all countries are good, what I'm saying is that such a simple dichotomy does not make for a rewarding reading experience. To elaborate:

While I was reading Babel, I was comparing it a lot to Flamefall (which is the second book in The Aurelian Cycle Trilogy) by Rosaria Munda since both deal with themes of inequality, revolution, and war. And honestly if you want an example of these themes handled well go read Flamefall instead (but obviously read Fireborne first lol). I'm just gonna say it here Babel was just a less interesting and less compelling version of Flamefall.

Like in Babel, there's also a colonial empire antagonist in Flamefall too, and it would have been so easy for the author to depict everyone under that regime as cruel and evil. But instead we actually see the day to day lives of ordinary people under that regime, how many people have different thoughts and beliefs and ideals and stakes. In addition we are also shown the lives of people under the "innocent" country and how the government and its people constantly make mistakes and errors and poor choices. This made for such a richer reading experience because we are shown the full stakes and complex actions of everyone involved, whereas in Babel, there exists no such complexity. And yes, I know there were a few moments (in the end where everything was crammed in) where the characters began to question their actions, but that ultimately lead to nowhere.

The conclusive message of Babel basically seems to be "white people bad, everything sucks, and then you die" (which is honestly most of literary fiction in general lmao) and that's fine I guess. Despite all of my above criticisms I will agree that it's a very smart book, and I know that every reader who picks it up will get something different out of it. I'm happy for them but alas, t'was not for me. I'm more than ready to read whatever epic fantasy Kuang comes out with next, but I think I'm gonna skip on her lit fic novels from now on.

Oh, and before I cast them out of my memory forever, fuck the footnotes.