I find it sad that I need to preface this review by clarifying that I am a Woman of Colour whose parents come from two countries that have experienced the brutality of British Empire. My Grandparents survived Partition. My family was dispossessed. To this day, my home countries are still suffering the ramifications of colonialism, and are also suffering under neo-colonialism. (No, my name is not actually Winona.)

I make this point because unfortunately, both Babel and RFK have been suffering from undue criticism due to angry racists. The reaction of white people with shallow egos is unsubstantiated. But just because white people have been vocal about disliking Babel for all the wrong reasons, it doesn't mean that this book is now absolved from valid criticism.

Babel is neither a good story or a good analysis of the British Empire. What it is good at doing is describing Oxford University and the surrounding area. If this had been a travel guide, I'm sure it would have done well. But alas, it's not one. Its meant to be some sort of alternative history of the British Empire where translators make magic by silver-working.

However, despite the presence of this magic system, absolutely nothing about the trajectory of the British Empire has been changed. Instead, RFK flexes her History degree, by dedicating a mammoth amount of text to recounting the events of the British Empire virtually verbatim, but with the addition of "silver" in front of the term "industrial revolution".

Indeed, this only part of the reason why Babel reads so much like an A-Level History textbook. There's just so much recounting. Not just of historical events, but also of the actual story. For the first 60% of the book barely anything of value to the plot or the development of the characters happens. Instead hundreds of pages are dedicated to summarising Robin and Co.'s time at Oxford. The only time we really get to spend actually sitting with the characters and experiencing what they're going through is in the first six chapters. Which covers Robin's growing up in Hampstead with Prof. Lovell. Once we actually get to Oxford, RFK just tells everything forthright.

The magic system is so overexplained its detrimental. Apparently one has to dream in a language in order for the silver-working magic thingy to work properly. Am I expected to believe that Prof. Lovell dreams in Chinese? Because I don't.

RFK is constantly telling the reader that Robin, Ramy, Victoire and Letty are all as thick of thieves because of everything that they do together. But she literally speed-runs their first three years at Oxford (which on Kindle, is about 500 pages) summarising the time they spent together. Thus, although we are constantly told that four are as thick-as-thieves, its all entirely superficial. There is no real relationship dynamic. The characters never get to just exist and form bonds. They are just pushed along until RFK can get to a point in the story where things become violent.

(spoiler!) This is particularly laughable because apparently Robin and Ramy are meant to be in love with each other, but we never actually SEE them together, so when they have their sparks fly its so confusing. If I hadn't re-read that part I'd never have realised that those two were meant to have romantic feelings for each other. Because there is NOTHING building up to it. Ramy is even less of a character than Robin is! (end spoiler!)

The problems that I had with Rin's characterisation in The Poppy War are multiplied tenfold in Babel. Robin is even more passive than Rin. At least Rin actively worked to get into Sinegard. But Robin just goes through the motions until the last thirty pages. He's always following someone else's lead. Its like RFK doesn't trust her own protagonist to be active in HIS OWN story. (Much like how she doesn't trust her reader to understand her themes or simple story without constantly telling us everything, but I digress.)

When he does turn into an active participant it doesn't feel earnt because Robin's characterisation is so poor. His development is non-existent because there's nothing to develop. He's a shapeshifter who looks so Chinese he gets racially abused, but he also looks so white that he can easily pass in Oxford society. That's frankly the most interesting thing about him.

The other main characters are even worse. They don't even feel like people. Instead, they feel like mouthpieces for Twitter discourse. At one point, Ramy refers to himself as a "Brown Muslim man", even though the conception of Browness as a marker of identity is an extremely modern concept. So modern that my own MOTHER finds it strange when I refer to myself as being Brown. Robin also makes a comment about how bland British food is despite how many countries with spices they've colonised. This is just so Twitter, I'm sorry. There's no way a SHELTERED child in the 18th Century, being raised by Prof. Lovell, would have any understanding of the breadth, depth and scale of the British Empire to make such an assessment. It also directly counters Robin's total ignorance of the depravity of the British Empire that he possesses for the vast majority of the book.

Letty is racist. But like how a 21st Century is racist. Not like how any white person in the 1830s would have been racist. Which was explicit, violent racism. Not passive aggressive microaggressions lmao.

Ramy is a Brown Muslim Man. He has quips. His dialogue is didactic but disguised as genuine arguments that he's making.

Victoire is...there? She's always commenting on how people mistake her for being Letty's maid. And that's about it. She suddenly develops importance in the story in the last thirty pages, but she suffers the most from RFK's shallow characterisation.

The rest of the characters are just there. They either feel like set-dressing or obvious plot devices. Several characters come and go, never to be heard of again, and then suddenly reappear for a big moment.

Honestly, it doesn't feel like RFK invested as much time in forming her characters from the ground up as she did researching British Imperial History. Her characters feel like they were dropped into the 1830s from the 21st Century to make commentary on racism, Empire, colonialism, and capitalism from an extremely modern perspective.

This all leads to a very surface level understanding of colonialism, Empire and racism. This might be acceptable if Babel were a YA book, but its not. Its targeted audience is adults adults, but RFK treats us like children as she bludgeons us over the head with her undercooked themes.

If you actually want to learn about how the British Empire operated and colonised peoples actively resisted please don't read this book. Instead, read anything by Robbie Shilliam, Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Spivak, C. T. Mohanty. If somehow, you've gotten this far down in the review, feel free to message me and I can give you plenty of recommendations.

But Babel? Just don't read it.

i’ve read two hundred and ten pages of this allegedly academic book and all i’ve come away with is the fact that i can’t stand rf kuang’s writing style. the author’s note in the beginning is completely unnecessary and feels like it’s no more than yet another way for her to flex the fact that she studied in oxford unlike the rest of us plebeians. “the trouble with writing an oxford novel is that anyone who has spent time at oxford will [nitpick] your text” yes, yes—is that not exactly what happens with any other real-world setting? you’ll have to forgive me for not understanding how ivory-towered oxford is any different.

now for my review of the actual book, which will be done in bullet points because this book is not worth the time and effort a full-length review will require:

• rfk can’t seem to decide whether she wants to use pinyin (with godsforsaken diacritics) or the actual characters themselves when she inserts chinese words into the narration. there’s seemingly no rhyme or reason to which she chooses to use at any point in time and i absolutely loathe it. if you want to switch between transliteration and using the actual characters, i beg you to come up with a coherent system for it.
• robin speaks mandarin in 1820s guangzhou, which is the most absurd thing i’ve ever heard of in my life. unless you had to deal with the imperial court, most chinese people would simply speak their own local variety. indeed, most chinese people today speak their own regional varieties, be it of mandarin or their topolect. watch literally any variety show, particularly if you speak a southern variety, and you will notice that even the form of mandarin most celebrities (being northerners) speak differs from standard mandarin. rfk inserts a footnote two chapters later to explain that it’s because robin’s family migrated from beijing recently, which would be a logical explanation for why robin speaks mandarin in his own home, but then claims cantonese is robin’s “preferred native tongue”? and yet he seems to instinctively revert to mandarin? make it make sense.
• the fact that pinyin is used in a book about languages and translation set in the 1820s KILLS me. the 1820s predates even wades-giles, which—no matter how much i hate the sight of it—would at least in turn predate pinyin, which was only created/formalised in the 1950s. that’s more than a century later. rfk would’ve been much better served doing less research on oxford for historical accuracy and more on the languages her protagonist speaks, i think. also, there’s that glaring (but unfortunately lost) opportunity to make some meta-commentary on the colonisation of language and translation (very relevant for this book, i believe!) in using wades-giles (a transliteration system created by white men) instead of pinyin (which was created by chinese people).
• speaking of historical accuracy and oxford, there are a bunch of things rfk openly admits to changing—not for any narrative purpose, no, but simply to parallel her characters’ experience to her own. for instance, despite “oysters being a staple of the early-victorian poor”, rfk “choose[s] to make them a delicacy” because “heaps and heaps of oysters on ice” was her “first impression of the 2019 may ball at magdalene college, cambridge”. the fact that this paragraph is then followed up with the sentence “if you find any other inconsistencies, feel free to remind yourself this is a work of fiction”—which, in fact, suffices to sum up her entire two-page author’s note—makes this justification completely fucking insufferable. either own your inaccuracies or cut them. quit dithering.
• rfk mistypes 無形 / incorporeal as 五行 / the five phases, despite 無形 being used correctly in the previous sentence. in the same page, she proceeds to translate “help me” as 幫忙 / help, which is such a clunky and awkward translation from a professional chinese-english translator that i am embarrassed on her behalf. i would’ve translated “help me” as 幫我 or 助我 (a more formal alternative which i think fits better in this context).
• the politics really are just twittercore but couched in a vaguely victorian-sounding register. i say “vaguely” because it really isn’t all that victorian. it just sounds like a slightly formal modern register. and apparently this problem is consistent with her other books, particularly yellowface, though it would at least make more sense for her to be responding to a very online form of criticism there.
• the fact that she uses a long-running stem/arts joke as an explanation for why babel hasn’t noticed the hermes society stealing their silver is just astoundingly beyond any capacity for suspension of disbelief i have. “for the virtue of a humanities faculty … was that everyone was hopeless with numbers” are you joking. is this a joke to you. you cannot possibly expect me to take this seriously.
• everything they’ve said and been taught about translation so far has been incredibly basic, and i’m only an amateur translator. i’d be embarrassed on oxford’s behalf if they truly taught this to third-year undergraduates.
• chattel slavery is a “wholly european invention” now :)
• despite this being an adult novel and therefore requiring some level of sophistication and maturity on the reader’s part, rfk can’t seem to resist the urge to shove her opinions—all entirely correct, of course—in the reader’s face. it’s pretty humiliating to read a book whose author seems to believe that the reader can’t go two sentences without being reminded that “racism bad” in the footnotes. of course it is, but i’d like to believe that it’s also possible to write a novel critiquing racism, elitism, and colonialism in academia without such hamfisted arguments.

anyway, i do think this novel does something good for the dark academia genre, in that it critiques the elitism inherent to academia, and it does have some good points about translation and colonialism and the like, but i think more subtlety and elegance would’ve served it better—and also better editing and proof-reading, because it’s genuinely embarrassing for your protagonist to make such errors in his native language(s).

✧─── ･ ｡ﾟ★: .✦ . :★. ───✧

pre-reading

why is he speaking mandarin in canton...

edit: they’re also using pinyin despite it not having been created until the 1950s? correct me if i’m wrong but the transliteration systems in use until the mid-19th century were based on nanjingese? so even if they did have a reason to speak mandarin it wouldn’t have been romanised this way