holy shit

As a fan of both Babel and Yellowface, I did expect this book to be academic and have concepts I didn't understand. But with Babel's use of language and history, I felt included and it made sense to the story. In Katabasis I constantly felt that Kuang was just saying concepts with no explanation of them, in order to sound smart. I can yell pythagorean theorem, it doesn't mean I'm intelligent.

The magic system is let down as a result of this, the characters reduced to muttering vaguely while scribbling chalk pentagrams and yelling concepts, which felt repetative, as if they were repeating the same steps for each allegedly different spell. While Babel use of language as magic was flawed, I felt the author's love of language came through, and I connected to that. I couldn't connect to this.

Alice seems to be a self insert of the author, which is bizarre to me as Alice is a genuinely horrible person, and Kuang doesn't do enough, if anything, to try and redeem her. From "suicidal depression was just an extreme form of failure" to "when she first heard that Professor Grimes had a problem keeping his hands to himself she felt a thrill of excitement", I struggled to understand how I was supposed to root for her.

Hell itself is grey. It felt completely lacking in description, and my excitement for seeing all the different realms and the people that were imprisoned there quickly disappeared after the first, when I realised that it was all going to feel exactly the same - dull, flat and grey. And it did. Only three realms had details that were memorable, and we never stayed there long.

The villains in this were entirely background for the majority of the book, and the Kripkes themselves seemed like a fairly useless edition, being little more than a mysterious presence. Grimes was better used, but at some point their epic quest to find him fell by the wayside, and his death would have been more satisfying had it not been at the start of the story.

This could have been an incredible bridge between Babel and Yellowface, had the concept of Hell been scrapped entirely, and all the sections of the past we kept going back to were used to tell the story in a linear timeline, ending with the professor's death. I could feel the author I enjoyed reading the most in those sections, and I don't feel she had a strong enough concept of Hell in mind to bother writing about it.

And did I mention the dog fellatio?