'Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution'
Warning: Potential Spoilers Ahead
The Tower of Babel is a biblical story where the people of the world band together to make a tower and city that would reach the heavens. This was made to unite the people of the earth and prevent them from moving across the earth. Disapproving of the people’s plans, God created different languages to make sure the people building the tower could not continue. When the builders could not understand each other, they quit, their mission dropped. According to the Bible, this is how different languages originated and why the people of the earth went to different lands to live.
Babel, in the context of Kuang’s novel, is the fictional school of Oxford where the main characters of the story study. Considering Kuang’s masterful writing and intention, she most likely had the biblical story in mind when choosing the name.
R.F. Kuang is my favorite author of this age. I have read about half of her works and know her to be a personal inspiration to my own writings. "Babel" was the first book by her I read, which gives it a special place in my heart. The novel is the definition of a book which balances historical and current relevance perfectly with fantastical elements, a reason why this book has been a favorite of mine for years.
"Babel" starts off with our main character, Robin, leaving his home nation of China to move to England. After a disease runs through his town, Robin is left as an orphan. Fortunately, a man by the name of Professor Lowell arrives around that time to take Robin to England to train him to study to eventually go to Oxford so he could use his first language as well as many others to help the British empire advance technologically.
How? The magic system in the book is rooted in languages. In order to create advanced technology, silver bars and languages are used. For example, if one wanted to be invisible one would have to translate two words from two different languages, leaving the words lost in translation to mean something along the lines of disappearing or being invisible. This means that people who know more than one language are prized in this version of the British Empire, for their bilingual brains are naturally great at the magic system. Robin, along with other characters you meet in the novel, are bilinguals who were taught different languages from childhood-Latin, German, Greek, and many more-in order to make them better workers for this magic system.
Even though the fantasy elements of this book make the book feel magical and utopian, the British Empire was what it was: an empire. This meant that they conquered vast lands and did not treat them with upmost kindness in order to gain their profits. As time goes on and Britian’s colonial motives-specifically with the Opium Wars-gets to Robin, he has to decide which side he is on: Britian, the nation where he studied and grew up, or China, the place where he was born?
What makes this book different from other fantasy novels out there are the themes that can be extracted from this book. Although the book mainly focuses on the colonization and exploitation of China, through other characters we learn about other injustices the British Empire caused. When the prestigious place of Babel is placed side by side with words of what that institution stands for, we learn how to fight against something even though we have directly benefited from it. Robin was trained since he was a boy to be an Oxford scholar. When the weight of turning against what you always strived to be part of in order to do what is right is placed on you, one is able to look past the glory of a subject and look deeper into what, or who, is actually building these massive empires, colonial or otherwise.
As Robin’s studies at Oxford continue, he starts to see the place from a different point of view. Life at Oxford is as wonderful to Robin as it is romanticized to us. Robin’s cohort become his closest friends, he excels in his studies, he believes his future is secure in Oxford’s hands. When Robin meets his half-brother Griffin, he learns of how the British Empire’s silver bars are not as magical as it seems:
“…Let me paint you a picture, brother. You’ve noticed by now that London sits at the centre of a vast empire that won’t stop growing. The single most important enabler of this growth is Babel. Babel collects foreign languages and foreign talent the same way it hoards silver and uses them to produce translation magic that benefits England and England only. The vast majority of all silver bars in use in the world are in London. The newest, most powerful bars in use rely on Chinese, Sanskrit, and Arabic to work, but you’ll count less than a thousand bars in the countries where those languages are widely spoken, and then only in the homes of the wealthy and powerful. And that’s wrong. That’s predatory. That’s fundamentally unjust.”
Later, Griffin sums up these words in a sentence, stating, “This is no accident; this is a deliberate exploitation of foreign culture and foreign resources.”
These words are what makes this book more than just any other fantasy novel on the market. I find that very few authors in the fantasy genre other than Kuang can work with important themes relevant to our world and do it well. Exploitation of people and resources without credit or anything in return still happens today just as it did two hundred years ago. The British Empire’s cutthroat reality is displayed in a way neither black nor white to our protagonists, it is simply a grey fog of questions on morality, justice, and opportunity.
R.F. Kuang, a former Oxford student herself, used her personal experience at the university to make this novel both aesthetic and accurate at the same time. She would have been able to imagine herself as Robin, a Chinese student at Oxford reaping the benefits of Britian while also knowing what that nation has done to China in the past and wondering where to draw the line. She used her experience as a student to include places that the characters go to as well as shift the history a bit to fit her own narrative.
"Babel" is a novel about how an empire’s colonies can be the thing holding their nation together, and how important that relationship is considering the abuses most colonial empires give their subjects. "Babel" is the academic novel of the century which manages to deal with themes both relevant in this day and age but also throughout history. "Babel" manages to be heartwarming, smart, critical, intelligent, and magical all at once. For those who want to read a novel that is complicated but also does not smack the reader in the face with the point for hundreds of pages, this book is for you. "Babel" to me goes like the building of the biblical structure: the further you go, the more disconnected one gets to what came happened before.
Thanks for reading!
“He hated this place. He loved it. He resented how it treated him. He still wanted to be a part of it-because it felt so good to be a part of it, to speak to its professors as an intellectual equal, to be in on the great game.” -R.F. Kuang, "Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution"
