I was trying to work on my WIPs but this thought won't leave my mind. I find it incredibly heartbreaking and poignant how Babel is a book about the ones erased from history and yet it still fails in so many occasions in telling their stories (and how it is on purpose). SPOILERS AHEAD.
From the start, we never get to know Robin's name, the last thing he thinks about before the end, and this is his story, which makes the loss even more staggering (even though Robin remembering his mother at the end is also hopeful and tender, because he didn't lose that memory). Despite all the pages spent describing the tale of all those Babel and white people don't believe they're human deserving of rights, their stories are incomplete, lost, and not only because the book is written following Robin's perspective. It's the English fault if we never get to know more about the Hermes Society. Anthony is so important to the story, yet we only know a little about him: as soon as Robin dares to believe in creating his path with the Hermes Society, Anthony and the others are brutally murdered.
Griffin is–I could talk hours about Griffin. He is Robin's foil, his brother, the incarnation of where the story is heading. Since the beginning, he is there to remind us the golden years are just a dream. He is the Cassandra telling everyone that violence is the only way to change things, and he's right, but at what cost. We don't know anything about him. We only have scraps. His last words –which were of comfort, of hope, not a recrimination like Robin thought– are never showed to us. We'll never know the impressive work he did all his life to make way for the revolution. Sterling, Evie, Griffin and Anthony were probably as intertwined as the main quartet: what is their story? What happened between Griffin, rejected son, and Sterling, who calls professor Lovell Richard? Did they love each other before and while hate consumed them? (Of course they did.) What happened in Burma? How much of Robin's cohort is a terrible replica of Griffin's? How terrible it is that we never get to feel the depth of Griffin's grief when he learns Anthony is dead? We only see the moment Griffin and Sterling manage to kill each other, ending their portion of the story once and for all.
We, like Robin, see the possibility of learning more about these people taken away from us. Robin will never get to see Ramy again, they'll never meet Ramy's parents in Calcutta. Victorie barely remembers her native language, Griffin's was taken away from him almost entirely. It's so much loss, of knowledge, of potential, of people, the ending of the book really feels inevitable. And right at the end, when you could dare to hope for a better future, when Victorie chooses to live? The only hope is her, and the book telling the story of the people who took Babel under siege. The book is the only way Robin may ever get to say his side of the story to posterity. And we, the reader, won't get the see the future either.
2087
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