Thoughts on Babel by RF Kuang ?
yes I have thoughts
What I absolutely loved about this book was the magical system. Sourcing magic from linguistics and translation is a bit genius to me. Especially because it happens because of the large syntactical/linguistic gap between words of two different languages. Love the paradox of translatio, love the idea that it only works when you speak the root language in your dreams (hence the translator-scholars in the tower, hence the forced displacement). Love seeing what the various match pairs and "daisy-chaining" methods can achieve- from a simple clock function to manipulation on a military/administrative level.
The emphasis on violent resistance was very refresing to read because I'm SICK of nonviolence and uwu diplomacy and moderate methods of dealing with your oppressors (coughs in Atla and Aot, the fact that Kuang has researched Atla makes it better) and at some point you either become complicit in the system or make a goddamm stand against it.
That being said:
Why is the alternate history so very adherent to real history? Don't you think silver magic would change the face of the industrial revolution, the self styling national image of Britain, its literature, its people? Why does Kuang play it so safe and never change any fundamental aspects of history except to tack the word "silver" before it? Example being, the industrial looms that put the workers out of business. Now they are just silver powered. What difference does that make in a fictional text? What crucial aspect was added that wasn't already present in the history of revolutions and colonial exploitation?
The characters are paper flat and are mere mouthpieces of their community. Was this a conscious choice in an allegorical text, was this is an authorial flaw who knows. What I do know is I read 600 pages and the only character who felt fully fleshed out was Letty, the white antagonist girl (good villain btw). I didn't give a penny about who lived and died. I didn't care about the survivors and the casualties. And there was a freaking Bengali character in the novel. Who dies. And I didn't care about it. That's like. That's a lot said.
Just to reiterate, this is a book about collective action and brotherhood among marginalized peoples, but the friendship is portrayed so inauthentically that I didn't root for them. Help why was I more invested in white racist privileged friends groups like The Secret History or If We Were Villains, than these three. Literally all they did was argue, lie to each other and talk about translation. Their "bonding" moments happened in footnotes or one-off mentions in large chunky paragraphs without dialogue.
This is very much a decolonization text written for white readers lol because the arguments and rhetoric are literally spoonfed as if to babies who need hand-holding. Just in case you needed it, Robin goes on like 14 different interior monologues that explicitly spell out "colonialism bad violence good" without any subtlety whatsoever and in this it is very much like the Teixcalaan duology by Arkady Martine. I felt like she was breathing down my back after a lecture, daring me to contradict her. The footnotes were also very academically researched and I appreciated them as resources but what did they contribute to the text as a literary work apart from guiding the reader through hefty etymology and factual details? This is not a term paper, it's a fantasy novel ffs.
Also I'm still salty that someone said Ramy speaks Bengali in the novel and I read the entire novel and the only thing he said was "Bismillah ur rahman ur raheem" which is, um. It's not speaking Bengali lmao. It's just a prayer by Muslims invoking the name of Allah the Beneficent and Merciful. It's common across all languages. That being said Babel is NOT a bad book, it's just not something revolutionary either.
