Multiple discovery refers to the common phenomenon of scientific and mathematical discoveries occurring in multiple places simultaneously and independently. It also refers to the hypothesis that this phenomenon is the rule rather than the exception for the accumulation of human knowledge and technology. In other words, it a hypothesis of evolution. Multiple discovery can be observed in fields as diverse as weaponry, calculus, cereal crops, and nuclear fission.
RF Kuang opens Babel with an author's note listing, among other things, the books she read to ensure her portrayal of 1830s Oxford was as accurate as possible. She does not cite any other bibliography, so the reader is left to wonder if she read any books regarding scientific or mathematical history. I am forced to conclude she did not, because the magic in her book -- the system supposedly underpinning her reality -- is so poorly conceived that it accidentally reifies the colonialist worldview she is trying to combat.
We are introduced to silver magic very early in Babel. We learn that it can do the following:
- Cure cholera
- Propel ships and carriages
- Purify water
- Keep food fresh
- Imagine anything produced by industrialization, silver magic can do that
It does this via the inscription of two or more words in different languages on a bar of silver. The tension between translations of the words, which have similar but not exact meanings and share etymological roots, creates the effect of the magic.
"Wow!" you might say, "how cool!"
I agree.
"That must change everything, right? Everything in this world must be completely different. What happened with the Inca Empire?"
Thank you for asking! Nothing. Or rather, everything, exactly the same as it happened in real life.
Babel is a novel of contradictions. Unfortunately most of these contradictions are self-inflicted and detrimental to the reading experience. The book follows Robin, whose Chinese name we never learn, as he leaves his mother's dead cholera-stricken body, spirited away to England by the father who refuses to acknowledge him. His father is a professor at Oxford, specifically at Babel, which does linguistic work in service of the empire. Robin nearly completes an undergraduate degree with three other classmates, who become his close friends, before intimate involvement with the beginnings of the Opium War leads to him becoming a violent revolutionary.
The book begins to fall apart as soon as we reach London, with hundreds of pages left to go. We are given a vague description of London, meant to highlight its differences from Canton. There is not enough specificity to conclude anything except that the author enjoys semicolons: London is "drab and grey" but also "exploding in color", "a city of contradictions and multitudes", where silver "glimmered from the wheels of cabs and carriages...shone from buildings under windows and over doorways, lay buried under the streets". We are told that China has minimal silver magic but tons of silver, a precursor to the warmongering Robin will try to stop. We are told that Robin is very curious about silver magic. Then he spends six years learning Latin and Greek while being subjected to racism by everyone he meets and also once being beaten by his father-ward with a fire poker.
We learn all of this at remove. We are literally told everything that Robin experiences. When Robin arrives at Oxford, we are subjected to linguistic lecture after linguistic lecture. We are told he makes friends who become his family; these friends rarely speak, get a few pages of POV in "interlude" chapters sprinkled throughout the book, and are only characters insomuch as they are as shallowly written as Robin himself. Robin attends lectures, which we get transcribed verbatim, and displays a stunning lack of curiosity about silver magic, even knowing it could have cured his mother, and even studying, supposedly quite demandingly, to become a silver magic-worker. There is also, inexplicably, a shitload of information about scones.
Robin's passivity is a huge issue throughout all of this, because it is his changing convictions, supposedly, which drive the novel's plot. But he has no convictions. On his first day in Oxford he witnesses a theft of silver, led by someone who appears to be his doppelganger. He helps the thieves escape, and we learn over time that the doppelganger is Griffin, Robin's brother. Griffin recruits Robin to his secret society to steal silver and secrets from Babel and distribute them throughout the Empire, with the intention of bringing Britain to its knees. Cool! Only, Robin doesn't seem to think so, or he's not sure what to think. Oxford, you see, is so nice. It is so nice to walk on marble floors, and to go to the library, and to sit by a fire, and to eat scones with your friends. It is nice even though half your friends can't go to half the libraries because they are girls, and you yourself are constantly having racial slurs flung at you. It is nice even though your professors threaten you and demean you and your heritage. It is nice even though you are a genetic experiment, because the rules of Kuang's silver magic dictate that it can only be used by those who dream in both languages. It is nice even though your dad-professor barely speaks to you.
Robin's passive bourgeoisie complacency only becomes more transparent and grating as the novel goes on. I've DNF'd fully half of the NK Jemisin books I've tried to read, but I found myself repeatedly wondering what she'd do with the book's central conceit, because she is someone who understands how power works and is interested in exploring real-world colonial power in a fantasy setting. This book actively avoids exploring those questions repeatedly. Many have noted that its linguistic lectures read like real lectures; I wouldn't be surprised if some were borderline transcriptions from Kuang's own experiences. But this means the novel suffers from an oddly atonal juxtaposition. Robin's primary role is to react to other people lecturing him about linguistics and social justice in very modern language. We may have our own opinions on how he reacts, but there is minimal exploration of the problems at the center of the novel's conceits. There are very few worldbuilding or ethical questions that Kuang seems interested in exploring, magical or otherwise.
I found the too-modern linguistics lectures frustrating in their lack of creativity as well. During the Victorian period, English was undergoing massive changes. Dictionaries, spelling standardizations, broader circulation of print materials, all should be impacting how language is discussed and, consequently, how the magic works. But it doesn't, because the magic is a loose structural support for Kuang's true passion: endlessly describing Oxford pastries and pubs.
These complaints are largely stylistic, but the narrative's anglophilia introduces a more serious problem as well. This novel is concerned with colonialism. Its protagonist is a young man who grew up subjugated and abused within the British colonial framework, and his journey centers around his struggles with the institutions that simultaneously enchant and abuse him. The answers to what he "should" do are always glass-clear to the reader and are usually clear to him. There is very little sense, past the (wonderful) opening scene, that Robin is meaningfully struggling with the realities of the world he lives in. We are told he struggles, but we just don't feel it with the same depth and meaning that we feel his affection for Oxford.
Now, some aspects of colonialism are unambiguous. It's an awful institution which must be resisted. It's fine to take that for granted and fine to state it baldly in the text. But the novel repeatedly comes up against the horrifying truth of the empire -- how such horrors can be dreamed of, implemented, permitted to occur, perpetuated, and praised -- and shies away from even considering answers beyond simplistic pablum about money and power. I think this is a very serious error in a novel which is, ostensibly, fantasy. One of the reasons people flock to SFF is that the genre allows authors to take readers on journeys of discovery with internal logic that serves the humanist questions of existence. It is impossible to overstate how little Babel is interested in using its genre to explore resistance to empire -- despite that theme's ostensible place at the center of the narrative. One thing happens after another, one semester ends and another begins, and the reader is not asked to expend even a moment of intellect or curiosity in regards to the fantasy elements of the story.
As a side note, this refusal to engage with fantasy as a genre has some weird and borderline offensive side effects. At one point, a Black female character tells her friend that slaves' chains were inscribed with magic to make them "docile, like animals". Chattel slavery happened in real life. Slaves were chained up, in real life. To change nothing about the world's history but to imply magic prevented them from escaping is to disregard real histories of revolt and resistance, at best.
Kuang's affection for Oxford also undermines her message. She repeatedly depicts Oxford education with respect and even awe, minimizing the sophistry and chauvanism that imperial propaganda requires except when she needs a villain for Robin to briefly resist. This immaturity extends to the magic system itself. Babel is the center of the universe because Britain alone among nations can do silver magic at scale. China has tons of silver, and France and Germany have translation institutes, but Babel and Babel alone produces the silver magic that makes the Empire run. Let's be blunt: this is colonialist propaganda! This is imperialist exceptionalism, put in the mouth of a bunch of 1830s colonized peoples and accepted as true. It is absurd to think that silver magic along among all developments in human history would be so atomized, so specific to one small college in one small region. It is doubly absurd when we're told in the early chapters of the book that silver magic dates to antiquity. I shouldn't need to tell a Cambridge, Oxford, and Yale scholar that most of what we know about antiquity we know through translation. This book asks me to believe the Ottoman fucking Empire took a look at silver magic and went "haha that would be crazy. Probably none of our business though".
This portrayal fails to interrogate the opportunistic nature of empire, its reliance on propaganda and its asymmetric power relations with subject nations. It neglects elements of chance and denies the agency of colonized nations in favor of passive acceptance of the fact of British superiority. Its contention is the contention of a would-be savior, ironically very similar to a Victorian reformist in ethic and attitude. It says, yes, Britain, you are truly better than everyone else. But you should exercise your power with greater care. You should be nicer. It is wrong to kill people. And, yes, of course it's wrong to kill people, duh. But the underlying assumption that Britain actually is better and more advanced than everyone else is never truly interrogated, much less deconstructed.
As the book moves forward, Robin realizes more and more that his situation sucks shit and so does Oxford. Unfortunately he chooses to do almost nothing about it. He finds out his friends Ramy and Victoire are also in the secret anti-colonialist society but he struggles with what to do with this information. A little pettiness, as a treat: it is not too hard to divine why a Yale PhD student whose Wikipedia bio lists her prep school might write a protagonist who cannot see any possibilities for his future beyond dying poor in a ditch or continuing to betray himself by working for the Empire in Oxford. But it does limit the narrative in a frustrating way. Robin doesn't even discover possibilities that he dismisses for some reason; he never seems to think of the concept of ordinary employment.
Ramy and Victoire themselves are profoundly underdeveloped throughout the narrative. Ramy exists to be a more self-aware colonized person, someone who understands he is oppressed and hates his oppressors. He is also gay and dies with an unacknowledged mutual attraction to Robin. How romantic! Let me translate for any heterosexual who might be reading this: I mean it's a homophobic plotline, and one we've seen before.
Victoire is even less developed than Ramy. She is a compulsive peacemaker who begs Robin and Ramy to forgive the fourth member of their cohort, Letty, even as Letty says wildly racist shit every time she's on-page. At one point Victoire and Letty are sexually harassed and nearly assaulted at a ball. Ramy says to Letty "This is all your fault" because Letty wanted to go to the ball. Victoire fades off-page. Oddly, though we are informed none of the protagonists can do laundry and this is why they can't live independently as fugitives, we are also informed in the epilogue that Victoire was trafficked/enslaved and forced to be a maid of all work for years in her childhood. Maybe she just didn't want to do laundry. Fair enough.
Gender, in general, is treated with profound unease in this book. Letty exists to be a kind of proto-"racist turncoat white feminist", a role that I think this book would benefit from were it coherent. Kuang seems to repeatedly forget about the material conditions she has placed "the girls" in; they are made to sleep far apart from everyone else, barred entry to libraries, told they have to cut their hair off, etc., yet the information provided is inconsistent and sometimes contradictory. This is a problem for the narrative for two reasons: firstly, it is jarring to read a scene where an Oxford ball is full of women and think "am I supposed to think they're all hired, or WAGs, or...?" Secondly, the history of white feminism (literal, not colloquial) is a history of deliberate alignment with white supremacy and disinvestment from working class solidarity. This history of course occurred bit by bit, decision by decision, and that history was happening in the time this book is supposedly set in. There is an actual interesting point that could be made with Letty's character that is completely ignored in favor of jarringly anachronistic politics. Victoire also gets the short end of the stick here: she is barely a character, she exists literally to be Robin's "rock" in some chapters, she is a cipher and an allegory despite being someone who is oppressed by way of race and gender. Justice for Victoire.
In the back half of the book, the narrative completely falls apart. Robin kills his father on the way back from a trip to his native Canton, after discovering that his father has been instrumental in deliberately failed diplomacy as a ramp-up to war. Robin's friends help him cover the murder up, but unfortunately they are all insanely stupid and are almost instantly discovered, after which point they flee with the Hermes Society. Letty kills Ramy and the British kill the rest of the Hermes Society. All of this escalates until the final act, in which Robin and Victoire, along with a few professors and other characters we have spent absolutely no time with, occupy Babel with the intention of forcing the British government not to go to war with China.
The occupation of Babel is deeply boring. They sleep, dither on what to do next, and Victoire keeps telling Robin to stop trying to commit suicide via terrorism. We hear about barricades being built, the army moving in, people dying as silver magic fails, and it all happens at such a great remove that I will forget nearly every scene within the next few weeks. In the end, of course, rocks fall and nearly everyone dies. We are treated to one of the worst paragraphs in the book, then a moving final paragraph, and then a ridiculous epilogue from Victoire's point of view that seems to exist entirely to reassure us that Kuang didn't kill her Black female character.
There are a few things worth discussing, though. The first is the working class solidarity in the last act. Robin is shocked to discover that the striking mill workers don't personally hate him, but they do hate the silver putting them out of work. He's shocked to find out working in a factory is bad (????). He's grateful for the barricades and the food, because he and Victoire seized the tower with absolutely no plan for holding it long-term. I might find this development moving except it is delivered in the most unbelievably fucking condescending prose known to man:
‘It was never about the silver,’ said Abel. ‘You realize that now, don’t you? It was about the wage-cutting. The shoddy work. The women and children kept all day in hot airless rooms, the danger of untested machines the eye can’t track. We were suffering. And we only wanted to make you see it.’
‘I know,’ Robin said. ‘We know that now.’
‘And we weren’t there to harm any of you. Well, not seriously.’
Victoire hesitated, then nodded. ‘I can try to believe that.’
‘Anyhow.’ Abel gestured at the barricades behind him. The movement was preciously awkward, like a suitor showing off his roses. ‘We learned what you were up to, and thought we might come up and help. At least we can stop those buffoons from burning the tower down.’
Justice for Victoire AND Abel! But, truly, after spending 500 pages telling us Robin can't leave Babel because he has no skills (RF Kuang: an education in 1830s England is itself a near-invaluable skill. Why do you think all them merchants' kids paid so much money to go to your alma mater), it is grating, galling, and exasperating to be treated to Poor People Have Convictions Too.
Also galling is the nonviolence vs violence debate. The book, obviously, builds to the conclusion that violence is necessary to resist empire. I don't disagree. But Kuang has given herself several huge legs up that don't actually exist in reality. Let's review: the Empire runs on silver magic. Silver magic is exclusive to Oxford. (During the siege, a professor makes a cutesy joke about Cambridge not being able to have a translation system, and how academic infighting will doom the Empire. Needless to say, this was embarrassing to read, as a normal person who has never debated if a nice library is worth the entirety of my self-respect.) The entirety of knowledge about silver magic, including extensive dictionaries, spell documentation, and crucial magical infrastructure is contained within Babel. Babel is accessible to our protagonists, because of magic, but impenetrable to our antagonists, also because of magic. Kuang even obliquely acknowledges the grace she's given her heroes:
They’d chosen a good day for revolution.
It was the first day of term, and one of the rare days in Oxford when the weather was deceitfully marvellous; when its warmth promised more sunshine and joy than the relentless rain and sleet Hilary inevitably brought. Everything was clear blue skies and zesty hints of spring winds. Everyone would be inside today – faculty, graduate fellows, and students – and the tower lobby would be empty of clients, for this year Babel was closed for reshelving and renovations during the first week of the term. No civilians would be caught in the crossfire.
But this Death Star-ass plotting is unbearable when placed in the context of an ostensibly serious work about anti-colonialism. Questions of violence and nonviolence are sure as hell easier to resolve when you are aiming for a single kill switch and can guarantee minimal casualties. At one point there is even a footnote about other revolts: "The tactics of revolt spread fast. The British textile workers picked up these techniques of barricade from the 1831 and 1834 Canut revolts by silk workers in Lyon. Those revolts had been brutally repressed – but, crucially, they did not hold the backbone of the entire nation hostage." I struggle to understand how anyone who read this book prior to publication did not identify this framing as condescending. The silk workers of Lyon, who existed in reality, did not have a single physically vulnerable target in which lay every single vulnerability of their nation. You simply cannot compare the two scenarios. A stronger writer would have recognized her limitations and improved her worldbuilding or declined to lecture the reader for several hundred pages on the nature of colonial resistance. Kuang only repeatedly reasserts her intellectual superiority.
And, finally, that leads me to the last major issue with this unbelievably bad book: condescending, defensive writing.
twitterpated, (adj.) first attested in the Walt Disney movie "Bambi", a past-participle adjective formed from twitter in the "tremulous excitement" noun sense (1670s) + pate (n.2) "head" (compare flutterpated, 1894). (Online etymology dictionary).
One would be forgiven, after reading this novel, for engaging in a little folk etymology and thinking that "twitterpated" describes the decline in mental acuity accompanying too much time spent on your Twitter dot com alt. This text pulses with terror that someone will somehow think Kuang herself thinks Chinese people are stupid and lazy. Every single time Robin encounters racism, there is a helpful footnote reminding us about slavery (often with flippancy entirely unsuited to the topic). Every single time someone makes an observation about racism in the text, we are told how to think about it:
‘I suppose he was a collector [of Chinese artifacts],’ said Robin. ‘Oh, I do remember now – he loved telling his guests about his acquisitions, where they’d come from and their particular histories. He was quite proud.’
‘How strange,’ said Ramy. ‘To love the stuff and the language, but to hate the country.’
‘Not as odd as you’d think,’ said Victoire. ‘There are people, after all, and then there are things.’
In addition to creating a sense of profound contempt for one's reader, this unsubtle writing creates a final act that is callous in its didacticism. Others have pointed out that the use of such anachronistic terms as "narco-military state" serves to occlude real histories of resistance; I strongly agree with this. But the lack of subtlety also creates a sense of completely unearned confidence as Robin attempts to bring the Empire down. Kuang knows what must be done; she feels very strongly about it. She puts arguments in favor of electoral politics in some characters' mouths, and arguments in favor of martyrdom or accelerationism in others'. But she never once approaches even a simulacrum of a realistic argument between leftist radicals. Instead, she is lecturing; even when she transparently changes her own mind, she allows no room for ambiguity, no room for struggle, no room for any of the very real trade-offs that actual real-life radical work and thought must grapple with. It is annoying to be lectured by someone who thinks you are too stupid to comprehend concepts like "slavery is bad". It is infuriating to be lectured by that same person who, with the zeal of the convert, has all the answers for her invented, vastly simplified version of real-world conflicts and struggles.
The future would be fluid. It was just as Griffin had predicted. One individual choice, made at just the right time. This was how they defied momentum. This was how they altered the tracks of history.
And in the end, the answer had been so obvious – to simply refuse to participate. To remove their labour – and the fruits of their labour – permanently from the offering.
This reads like someone who internalized more of Texas's "Remember the Alamo" propaganda than she is willing to admit. This is an individualist, borderline libertarian, understanding of struggle. It is over-confident and under-informed.
It's also worth noting that the footnotes assume you're stupid even for less serious topics. At one point there is a verbose footnote that exists solely to explain that an implied love triangle really was a love triangle. Kuang doesn't trust you to run to the corner store for some cigarettes, but she also doesn't trust you to get down the front steps without help.
Kuang needs Robin to be alone in the tower late at night, so she instructs us about the history of Morse code for four paragraphs. To solidify Babel as the center of the world, she has American Morse Code be perfected by Babel scholars rather than Morse and Vail. She then proceeds to say that Babel scholars learned Morse code in a few days, because it was an exceptionally easy "language" to learn, provided one intended to use it for English.
Morse code isn't a fucking language! It's a cipher! It's a code! Because of the condescending infodumping that dominates the text, the inconsistency jumps out right away. This is emblematic of the book's poor writing: plot necessity drives everything from narrative details to character decisions. None of the characters seem like real people; the world doesn't seem like a real world. The final product is didactic yet ignorant, sloppily written yet obsessed with the importance of language, and strikingly unimaginative.
Originally I was going to end this review with a note that I'm disappointed the NYT, LARB, and so on gave this book a good review. But the more I think on it, the more their approval makes sense. This is a fantasy book that is wholly uninterested in fantasy and transparently thinks its readers are stupid. Of course LARB loved it. The tyranny of low expectations strikes again.
