R.F. Kuang's BABEL: Or, The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution

R.F. Kuang has been on my radar for a while but it was this year that she published a book that I absolutely knew I was going to have to read right away, not just put on the never-ending TBR list. I mean, it's about language translation, foreign language study, and colonialism. And Mandarin! The only way it could have been more in my wheelhouse would be if Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translator's Revolution somehow also managed to concern insects, amirite?

The novel starts off an early chapter with a neat little quotation from none other than C.S. Lewis, long before the first time reader realizes the quotation is probably meant ironically, as something to be subverted, rather than reverently, as something to be illustrated and upheld:

"But this shall never be: to us remains

One city that has nothing of the beast, 

That was not built for gross, material gains, 

Sharp, wolfish power or empire's glutted feast."

Lewis was celebrating his university, Oxford, but we can never be sure how sincerely he meant these lines. He never struck me as an especially naive man, but nor did he seem a great satirist. At any rate, in our world the notion of a university as a place above and apart from commerce and politics is a belief more useful as a rhetorical device than a realistic description, and in the world of Babel it's cause for bitter laughter before our young hero has finished the first day of his studies there. 

In this alternate universe, it has been discovered in the late Renaissance/Early Enlightenment period that silver has certain magical properties that can be harnessed by engraving it with pairs of words from different languages that mean approximately the same thing but not precisely; it's the tension between the differences that powers the forces employed to use silver bars as talismans that can alter the world. Fir example, a bar engraved with the English word "meticulous" and its Latin forerunner (etymology matters!) "metus" (meaning "fear or dread") has the effect of producing "a chilling anxiety whenever the user erred in their work" -- or as a character complains when they're lent it to use in preparing for exams "It doesn't tell you where you went wrong... It just makes you want to vomit for no reason you can discern."

Once a bar has been so engraved, it must be activated by a person fluent in both of the languages employed, making speakers of foreign languages* into human resources of great importance, to be highly prized -- so much so that some members of the upper crust of this universe's British Empire have resorted to breeding them like livestock. Such are the origins of our hero, a half-English, half-Chinese boy who takes the English name of Robin Swift since he's not allowed to use the surname of his biological father, a professor of translation at Oxford University, who has allowed Robin to grow up for a few years with his mother under the guidance of a hired British nanny but who then callously allows Robin's mother to die of cholera when Robin is old enough -- about eight years old -- to be useful, fluent enough to think and dream in his native Mandarin Chinese but also in the English he grew up speaking with his nanny.

Soon Robin is whisked away to England to continue his education with private tutors, living in his father's posh London home but rarely interacting with the man, until it's time for Robin to matriculate at University College, Oxford, in 1830, when its mighty silver-working facility, Babel, is at its mightiest. Someday Robin will be one of the rare and valued few who can make new magical silver bars to continue enriching the British Empire, which sits at the center of endless flows of raw silver and thus of all other forms of the world's wealth.

Silver is also accelerating the pace of industrial development relative to our own world; the magic of silver bars is automating processes that required human input well into our 20th century. Here the Luddites were but an early wave or violent protest and crushing poverty experienced by Britain's artisans and skilled laborers back while Victoria was still just a pretty little princess being spoiled by the Sailor King.

Robin quickly comes to sympathize with his fellow colonials (his class at Babel consists of a young Muslim man from India, a young Haitian woman, and a token native Brit who is still marginalized at Oxford because she's a woman) and with the plight of the newly unemployed, and gets drawn into a secret society that relies on marginalized students like him to pilfer silver and engraving materials from the fortress of Babel for use undermining the Empire. That society, called Hermes, has an even closer claim on his loyalty than might first seem apparent, though: before there was a Robin, there was a Griffith, who was taken from his own Chinese mother too early to develop true fluency in his native language and thus proved a disappointment to their father. D'oh!

Much of the tension of the novel's first third or so, then, arises from Robin's keen awareness of his situation as both a valuable resource to the Empire but also a complete dependent on it: a slave, though a well-treated one who is being allowed to do what he loves most.

Inevitably, our hero finds his way back to his birth city of Canton just in time to find himself interpreting a confrontation between a British businessman and General Lin Zexu over Britain's arrogant insistence on continuing to import opium into China despite the Emperor's increasingly strict edicts against the stuff. Meaning Robin is there for the first salvo of the first Opium War. And to see his last excuses for pretending not to see the problems attendant on his enjoyable situation, the price paid by others for his privileges and comforts, go up in smoke. Well, something has to incite the titular translators' revolution, doesn't it?

This takes place in the final third of the book amidst broken fellowships and surprise alliances as everybody discovers the real powers of solidarity and class consciousness -- and of unintended consequences. Suddenly every chicken the British has ever wronged comes home to roost in its new Tower of Babel. And they might have brought a bomb or two...

The result of all of these odd juxtapositions and weird story beats is an exciting and deeply affecting novel that I'm going to remember for a long time and will probably want to read more than a few times. Phew!

*Especially speakers of non-European languages, because speakers of these have been in contact with English and vice-versa for too long and loan words and other cross-pollinations like false cognates and folk etymologies drain too much of the necessary tension out of those word pairings,  meaning that bars engraved with an English and a French or Italian or German word are weak sauce by the time our story begins.