Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution

R. F. Kuang

Aug 2022 · Sold by HarperCollins

About this ebook

Ignite your imagination with this immersive fantasy read!

Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller from the author of The Poppy War  

“Absolutely phenomenal. One of the most brilliant, razor-sharp books I've had the pleasure of reading that isn't just an alternative fantastical history, but an interrogative one; one that grabs colonial history and the Industrial Revolution, turns it over, and shakes it out.” -- Shannon Chakraborty, bestselling author of The City of Brass

From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal retort to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British empire.

Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.

1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel.

Babel is the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver working—the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars—has made the British unparalleled in power, as its knowledge serves the Empire’s quest for colonization.

For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to stopping imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide…

Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence? 

Ratings and reviews

I loved the first 20%, but after that, the protagonist's journey of betrayal and the platitudes it was based on were wrenching. The book's central thesis - the necessity of violence for change, only works in the book because of an extremely contrived situation of centralized dependence made possible literally by magic. And it calls for martyrdom for little gain. If its thesis were true, the world would be hopeless. But the world has improved since those days - even for the poorest. Some of that has come from martyrdom (like the recent deaths in Ukraine resisting old fashioned imperialism.) But some has come through politics and changing people's beliefs.

I think I hated this book. The premise is cool and the use of language is impressive. However, it is written at a young adult fiction level, without the good natured fun. The narrative spends so much time explaining everything, there is no space for imagination. It becomes so heavy with explanation, I could no longer bear it. It began to skip the long paragraphs of painful spoon feeding of ideas and only read the dialogue. Unless you are a huge Kuang fan, I would give this one a miss.

I could go no further when females, black and white...and a black man were introduced as characters attending Oxford University in the 1830s! Abviously, not historical....just fiction. I do not understand the rewriting of history to suit present day.

About the author

Rebecca F. Kuang is the #1 New York Times and #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of the Poppy War trilogy, Babel: An Arcane History, and Yellowface. Her work has won the Nebula, Locus, Crawford, and British Book Awards. A Marshall Scholar, she has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford. She is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale, where she studies diaspora, contemporary Sinophone literature, and Asian American literature.