Babel, or The Necessity of Violence by RF Kuang

(Note: spoilers for the entire plot of “Babel”.)

Are you bilingual, or have you spent time learning a second language? Have you been frustrated trying to translate something, because the perfect word just doesn’t exist? Do you have a foot in more than one culture/race, and want to read a sophisticated treatment of situations like yours? Do you like fantasy novels and magic systems? Same here, which is why I was interested to read “Babel”.

“Babel” is an unusual fantasy book in that it achieved popularity both within and outside the genre, including with People Who Read Serious Books (like my friend with a PhD in English Literature, who recommended it). It was front and centre in the windows of major bookshops; it got glowing reviews in mainstream newspapers like “The Guardian”; it won not only a Nebula award, but also a British Book Award and a Blackwell’s Book of the Year, which are for fiction regardless of genre.

Also unlike most fantasy novels, “Babel” is very explicitly about real-world politics and race relations - no allegory involved. The setting is Early 19th Century Earth But With Magic, and the protagonist is a Chinese immigrant to England, who plays an important role in triggering the First Opium War (a major historical real-world conflict), and resists British colonialism as part of an underground society. Most of the novel is set in Oxford and revolves around its institutions, with small portions set in Canton, China. Kuang is eminently qualified to write about all of these things, as a young first-generation Chinese immigrant who studied Sinology at Oxford.

The novel begins with a fairly typical fantasy set-up: an orphaned boy is lifted from poverty and pestilence to the spires of Oxford, but soon realises that his admission is less because of his scholarly merits, and more a means for the dons to exploit the power of his native Mandarin. This is because the magic system is based on translation, which was a fairly new idea to me and a particular selling point: in this universe, the untranslatable gaps between languages can be manifested to create physical effects. When I picked up “Babel”, I expected a classic coming-of-age fantasy, with a fascinating magic system, an interesting perspective on the Oxford experience, and a nuanced insight into linguistics and race relations, with recognisable elements from my own time as a first-generation Chinese Oxford student. My goal in this review is to argue that “Babel” fails to deliver on any of those promises, and doesn’t deserve all its acclaim and accolades.

Part I: Plot summary

Robin is dying in an epidemic in his native Canton, which has already killed his entire family. An Oxford professor he has never met before heals him with a magical silver bar, tests him to confirm that he has magical potential, and takes him to England. Under Professor Lovell’s tutelage and sponsorship, he gains a scholarship to study at the Babel, the Translation Institute in Oxford, which is the centre of magical power and the linchpin of Britain’s colonial success. Robin and his three classmates are a collection of misfits: foreigners, women, and foreign women, and together they bash their heads against grammar, etymology, bad British food, and the snobbery of the Oxford establishment. Later, the upper-class British girl in the group, Letty, falls in love with the Indian boy, Ramy, who does not reciprocate her feelings; Robin and Victoire, the Afro-Caribbean girl, join them in pretending that nothing is wrong.

The students learn that magic works by finding translation gaps: specifically, linking pairs of equivalent words in different languages which have untranslatable nuances, and making those nuances manifest in the real world. An early example is “speed”, in English, with “spes”, in Latin: the Latin carries connotations of hope and safety which the English lacks, and this is used to make carriages travel slightly more safely and smoothly. Making the magic work requires two things: a silver bar inscribed with the words, and a scholar who is fluent in both languages. Robin and his friends learn that European languages are yielding diminishing returns; they have been admitted so that the Institute can gain access to the power of their native languages from China, India, and the Caribbean. They also learn that the Institute directly supports the British colonial armies and is a major source of their power.

Late one night, Robin stumbles across Griffin, a young man who looks uncannily like himself, stealing magical materials from the Translation Institute. Robin helps him hide from the authorities; he learns that Griffin is his half-brother, and that Professor Lovell is their father. Lovell conceived them with Chinese women and sent them to be brought up in China, so that they would be fluent in Mandarin for translation work. Griffin was brought to England too early, when his grasp of Mandarin had not yet solidified; he could not work the magic consistently and lost his place both at Oxford and in Lovell’s household.

Resentful of his father’s lies and exploitation, Robin allows Griffin to recruit him for his terrorist organisation, the Hermes Society. Whenever he receives instructions, Robin helps them steal magical materials from the Institute, to be used to fight British colonialism across the world, although he is never told where, by whom, or how. He leads a double life as a scholar and occasional thief, constantly terrified he will be found out.

Near the end of their studies, Lovell takes Robin and his classmates on a translation mission to Guangdong, China. Robin is expected to facilitate the colonialists’ humiliation of the Chinese government, in a close parallel to the events which precipitated the real-world Opium Wars. He complies reluctantly, and realises too late that the British intend to provoke conflict and create a pretext to invade China for its silver. His guilt over his complicity, and his general resentment of Lovell, come to a head during a quarrel on the voyage back to England, in which he snaps and kills Lovell. His friends help him hide the murder long enough to get back to Oxford, although Letty tries to persuade them to turn themselves in and has to be brought back on side.

The group are found and taken in by members of Hermes. They hide in a safe house in Oxford, read in the papers that Parliament is debating an invasion of China, and plan a campaign of pamphleteering, lobbying, and strategic sabotage to prevent it. After some time Letty sneaks out and leads the police back to arrest them. There is a standoff; Letty shoots and kills Ramy. Most of the Hermes members are taken by the police, and Griffin is killed breaking Robin and Victoire out of prison.

Robin and Victoire take over the Institute with a magical weapon and a gun, barricade themselves in with a few sympathisers, and send an ultimatum to the British government: there will be no more magic until you agree not to invade China. They are ignored, and start to slowly dismantle the magical systems underpinning Britain’s infrastructure and industry, in an attempt to force Parliament to take them seriously. They find unlikely allies in a group of trade unionists and Luddites, who help fight off the police when they attempt to storm the Institute. Finally, the army arrives, with Letty delivering the government’s ultimatum: surrender or die. Robin uses forbidden magic to blow up the tower and all its magical resources with him inside, while Victoire escapes to join the resistance in the colonies.

Part II: Magic system

A central example of the translation magic is the invisibility match-pair which first hides Robin and Griffin from the authorities: “wúxíng” and “invisible”. The Mandarin “wúxíng” is a compound of “without” and “shape”, and carries nuances of being formless and immaterial which the English doesn't. By manifesting this translation gap, the thieves become “not merely beings that couldn’t be seen. They weren’t beings at all … they drifted, expanded; they were the air, the brick walls, the cobblestones.”

The magic system clearly comes from someone who loves languages and linguistics. Kuang takes the familiar frustration of many multilingual people and language learners - having the perfect word for something in one language, but having to grope and talk in circles around its absence in another - and turns it into a source of power. The novel is littered with examples of interesting words from Mandarin, Arabic, classical and modern European languages, and languages from the Indian subcontinent. Every chapter has footnotes with linguistic details that didn't fit into the text (usually several per chapter). The characters discuss loan words with unusual histories, and trace obscure etymologies through a range of languages that includes Romance languages, Proto-Germanic, Urdu, Sanskrit, and Arabic (did you know that the the English “typhoon” and the Mandarin “táifēng”, both referring to great storms, derive from the Greek monster Typhon, whose name became associated with violent winds in the Arabic “tufan”?). At one point, a professor lectures Robin on the philosophy of translation, exploring the balance between faithfulness to the original text on one hand and bridging the gap to the audience’s cultural context on the other. They discuss the idea that it is impossible to translate completely without distortion, and therefore the translator's duty is to choose the most appropriate distortion for the task at hand. But in Kuang’s eagerness to include as many interesting linguistic elements as possible, they neglect the consistency of the magic system.

The majority of the linguistic detail in the novel is about etymology. We are told early on that match-pairs need to be etymologically related. For example, the spell which saves Robin from the epidemic links “treacle” to the French “triacle”, both of which derive from the Latin “theriaca”, meaning “antidote”, which in turn has roots in Greek. When Robin and his classmates are trying to devise their first spells, they are told to look for cognates, “often the best clues for fruitful match-pairs, since they were on such close branches of the etymological tree.” They are warned to beware of false friends: for example, the Persian “farang”, referring to Europeans, appears to be cognate with the English “foreign”, but they are in fact etymologically unrelated. The English word actually derives from the Latin “fores”, meaning “doors”, and therefore “linking ‘farang’ and ‘foreign’, then, produced nothing.” Robin and his classmates study etymology until they “could not utter even common phrases and aphorisms without pausing to wonder where those words came from… [it] became the default way they made sense of each other and everything else”.

Yet, none of the Mandarin-English match-pairs we see, which drive some of the most significant moments in the plot, are based on an etymological link. Take it from a reviewer who both speaks Mandarin and has fact-checked with Wiktionary: there is no etymological link between “wúxíng” and “invisible”, which hides Robin and Griffin from the police when they first meet. Another example: for Robin’s assignment to devise his first original spell at the Translation Institute, he pairs “míngbái”, a Mandarin compound of “bright / clear” and “white”, with the English “understand”, which gives him a feeling of enlightenment and a bright light. In the match-pair which Robin uses to kill Lovell, “bào”, a Mandarin word for explosion with connotations of violence, is linked with “burst”, creating a violent explosion. None of these pairs have any shared etymology, and this is never acknowledged or explained in the text. In fact, the book only contains one example of a Chinese-English pair with a common etymology - the “typhoon”-“táifēng” example mentioned above, which is never used for a spell at all.

The novel is very vague about the rules that govern which of the untranslatable meanings gets produced in a given spell. The narrator asserts, for example, that the “wúxíng”-“invisible” pair manifests “a concept that neither the Chinese nor the English could fully describe”, but the effect we are shown seems to fit the connotations of the Mandarin exactly. Most of the match-pairs we see manifest the nuances of one word, contrasted against the other’s literal meaning. For example, “track” (as in tram tracks) is matched with “trecken”, meaning “to pull” in Middle Dutch, resulting in tracks which pull the carts forward without needing a power source. “Míngbái” is paired with “understand”, creating a bright light from the Chinese without any hint of one thing being “under” another. “Bào”, with its connotations of violence and cruelty, is paired with the tamer English “burst”, creating the violent explosion with which Robin kills Lovell.

One might surmise from these examples that the word which the translator incants first is the one whose connotations are manifested. But sometimes both the connotations are manifested: the match-pair which saves the young Robin in the Cantonese epidemic is “treacle” with “triacle”, which manifests both the sweet taste from English and the healing properties of the French and its Greek roots. Perhaps the manifestation is actually guided by the intent of the translator? There is actually some evidence in the text for this: when Robin kills Lovell, we are told that “words only activated the bars if you meant them … he must have thought of what it would do.” However, it’s a real stretch to believe that Lovell intended to give Robin the sweet taste of treacle in his mouth when healing him (his character is firmly established as not being given to whimsy or kindness for its own sake). And, more importantly, the intention hypothesis is not compatible with the newly orphaned Robin making the test spell work, and creating the expected effect unusually strongly at that (a phantom taste of dates in his mouth - more on this later), without even knowing that it would be magical at all. Ultimately, it seems that the outcome which occurs is the one which is most convenient for the author at the time.

Neither is there a consistent level of fluency required to work the magic. Early on, a lecturer explains to Robin’s class that “you need to be able to think in a language - to live and breathe it, not just recognise it as a smattering of letters on a page.” Such a high level of mastery is required that Lovell conceives Griffin and Robin, and sends them to be raised in China, so that they can be fluent enough to work the match-pairs, and even despite this Griffin loses his place at Oxford because he left China too young to retain his fluency. Yet, much of the magic we see in the book is performed by English scholars using Latin and Greek. Both Robin and Griffin are able to use Latin for magic, having learned it as a third language in their adolescent years, in what seems to be conventional Classics classroom settings (book-work, with no evidence in the text of conversational practice or use outside the classroom).

The lecturer goes on to explain that the fluency requirement is why magic cannot be done with “ancient languages like Old English”, even though “we’ve got such extensive dictionaries and we can trace the etymology quite clearly, so the bars would be wonderfully exact”, and why “invented languages” will never work. This argument ignores the fact that Old English is so well-documented because there are scholars who specialise in it, reading, translating, and working with it full-time, and who therefore ought to be approximately as fluent in it as the Classicists in Latin and Greek. On the other hand, if the lecturer is for some reason correct about the special status of the Classics, then the spell using the Middle Dutch word “trecken” (see above) ought not to work at all. As for “invented languages”, evidence from real world examples like Esperanto show that constructed languages can be self-sufficient, and can have native speakers. A language designed specifically for magic could have whatever translation gaps were most useful, circumventing the process of searching for match-pairs, which the scholars complain relies on a great deal of luck to find one with practical applications. Establishing a constructed language may be arduous, but with such rewards at stake, we should certainly expect the translation institute to invest the required resources.

With all the emphasis on finding match-pairs, it is easy to overlook the spell at the start of the story which actually uses phrases. After Robin recovers the epidemic, Lovell tests him for magical potential: he asks Robin to read from a silver bar which translates the Mandarin idiom, “húlún tūn zăo”, with the English “to accept without thinking”. Every other spell in the novel matches a pair of words, and this limitation is what makes devising match-pairs so difficult, requiring a vast knowledge of languages; to invent their first spell, Robin and his classmates spend weeks searching through libraries to find a pair that will produce a magical effect at all. “Húlún tūn zăo” is not a word in the usual sense: it is a phrase literally meaning “to swallow dates without chewing”, but it is at least an established Mandarin idiom, which can be found in a dictionary. The English translation does not have even that distinction, and the fact that this spell works undermines one of the fundamental rules of the magic system.

Another unexpected degree of freedom is found in the “bào”-”burst” match-pair, which we examined earlier: “burst” is not the closest or most natural English translation. As Lovell explains, the left-hand half of the character “bào” is “the radical for fire. And beside it, the radical for violence, cruelty, and turbulence, the same radical which on its own can mean untamed, savage brutality; the same radical used in the words for ‘thunder’ and ‘cruelty’.” To my mind, a much more natural translation for this would be “explode”. And yet, “he translated it against ‘burst’, so tame that it hardly translates as such at all - so that all of that force, that destruction, was trapped in the silver.” In other words, the translator had the freedom to choose a poor translation in order to produce the effect he desired, even though better alternatives were available in the language. This goes against the core concept of the magic system, which takes its inspiration and its appeal from the frustration of the perfect translation not existing. The magic is established as being about nuances that are untranslatable, not just untranslated; as the narrator puts it, “a concept that neither the Chinese nor the English could fully describe”. If the “bào”-”burst” match-pair is allowed, the magic is no longer about any inherent difference between the two languages, only the choices made by a given translator at a particular time, which makes it much less special and interesting. Without a requirement to find the best translation, the requirement for fluency and mastery of the languages makes less sense. And with this extra degree of freedom to use words so tenuously related that they “hardly translate as such at all”, there is little reason for devising new match-pairs to be as arduous as we are shown.

To put it as charitably as possible, the magic system in “Babel” is based on a core concept of untranslatable gaps between languages, with little elaborations which don’t apply everywhere, like using etymologically unrelated match-pairs, manifesting multiple effects at once, translating from dead and obsolete languages, translating with phrases instead of words, and deliberately choosing poor translations for effect. This kind of inconsistency is not necessarily terrible, and the fantasy genre offers many examples of interesting, thoughtful magic systems built this way: the novice learns the basic concept, and with practice finds that the rules are not as rigid as they thought, until they attain mastery and can do things no-one has previously imagined. But to be narratively satisfying, the elaborations and exceptions have to be tied to the character’s journey, with the greater power and freedom earned in some way. In most great stories, this is by training, study, and gradually accumulating experience (think Dresden Files, Harry Potter); in others, by research and experimentation (Elantris, Name of the Wind, Shadow of the Conqueror); in others, by arduous quests for artefacts or arcane knowledge (Alex Verus); and in others, by character growth, introspection, and enlightenment (Stormlight Archives, Name the Wind), which may earn divine intervention (Paladin of Souls).

This sort of scheme could have been made to work in the “Babel” universe. For example: novices can only use match-pairs with an etymological link, but all the powerful and commercially useful pairs are etymology-free, and require decades of study to master. A few sage scholars have successfully revived a dead language like Old English for magic, and in the process gained enough insight to be able to create a functioning constructed language, which is tailor-made for magic. They have made a few spells work in it as a proof of concept, but their older brains aren’t adaptable enough to master it fully; they are raising a cohort of children as native speakers of their new language. Most of the most powerful magicians at the Institute are feeling uncertain and threatened, and faction-fighting shenanigans ensue.

Unfortunately, in the actual novel, nothing like this exists. The different variations are scattered haphazardly throughout the story, with no correlation to skill or character development, or any significance attached to them at all. To me, they can only be interpreted as mistakes, oversights, and ad-hoc fudges.

Not every fantasy world needs to have a magic system with consistent, well-explained rules: in “The Lord of the Rings”, for example, magic is largely mysterious, the province of inscrutable wizards and semi-divine beings, and generally beyond the reach of the protagonists like Sam and Frodo. But if a text does hand magic to the protagonist, and attempts to lay out explicit principles, it had better make them consistent - or at least acknowledge the inconsistencies and make them a source of frustration for the characters as well. Otherwise, the reader may well reach the end of their patience and post a long review on the internet unpicking the inconsistencies in painstaking detail.

Part III: Characters and race relations

IIIa: Robin

From the beginning, Robin’s story is characterised by inner conflict, guilt, and hesitation. Growing up in Lovell’s household, he is aware that the professor has saved his life, provides for his needs, is giving him the best possible education, and preparing him for a place at Oxford’s most prestigious Institute. Robin wants to please him, and craves his approval. On the other hand, he experiences the professor’s brutal side when he is beaten for being late for a lesson, in a manner calculated “to inflict maximum pain with the minimum risk of permanent injury”, and threatens to dump him back on the streets of Canton. He suspects that Lovell is his father but knows it will never be acknowledged, long before Griffin confirms it at Oxford. And he is acutely aware that Lovell had been in China for weeks before rescuing him, and therefore could also have saved his mother but did not. Later, at Oxford, he asks Lovell why his mother could not have been rescued; Lovell snaps, “For God’s sake, she was only just a woman”, and dismisses the subject.

During his time at Oxford, Robin studies to become a translator by day, and steals from the Institute by night. When he first meets Griffin, his first thought is that he should raise the alarm, but he hides him and his fellow thieves from the authorities for no reason he can explain. When Griffin tries to recruit him to Hermes, Robin is initially reluctant to join the thieves, not knowing anything about the people involved, where and how the stolen materials will be used, or what they are able to accomplish. He is drawn in against his better judgement, by a combination of Griffin’s charisma and his own resentment of Lovell (the recruitment takes place immediately following the conversation about not saving his mother). After the first theft, he is terrified that he will be caught, wracked with guilt about “such an act of betrayal - of stealing from Babel itself, the institution to which he’d literally given his blood”, and spends the day “wishing he’d never been ensnared in this nightmare.” Still, he keeps doing it, and it becomes routine for him. Eventually, it is an act of rebellion “whose main purpose was to assuage his guilt” over enjoying a privileged life at Oxford, with his scholarship from an Institute whose wealth derives largely supporting British colonialism.

Babel, as he gradually learns, serves the interests of the British Crown, providing translators for the colonial administrations and magic to augment the army’s guns and the navy’s ships, in exchange for ongoing supplies of silver taken (stolen) from the colonies. The Institute’s other main source of income, according to Griffin, is luxuries for the British upper classes: magically powered parlour decorations, clocks, lush gardens, and the like. Very little magical activity is used to make the world better, like healing the sick or helping the poor.

Although repulsed by these revelations, Robin is thriving at Oxford: “it stunned him, how quickly he fell in love with the place and the people.” He finds a sense of purpose and belonging in his studies, a place where his talents matter and he can excel. His classmates become his family; they “unlocked a part of him, a place of sunshine and belonging, that he never thought he’d feel again.” He “felt a crush of guilt then for loving them, and Oxford, as much as he did”, and never seriously considers telling them about Griffin and the Hermes Society. Robin is unsure how to resolve the contradiction between his desire for the easy life of a Babel scholar, and his sense of injustice over its colonial associations.

He never gets a chance to figure it out, before he kills his father and has to go into hiding. The quarrel starts on their return journey from their Canton mission, with Lovell reprimanding Robin for his half-hearted efforts in translating for the colonialists there. He accuses Robin of ingratitude, of reverting to his base Chinese blood and its “laziness and deceit”. Robin confronts him about his mother again, and is met with contempt and anger. They both stand up and reach into their pockets; we don’t know what Lovell was reaching for, but in a moment of rage, Robin pulls out the silver bar with the explosion spell and blows a hole in his father’s chest.

Robin’s reaction is telling: the first thing he does is shake Lovell’s corpse, calling out “Sir? Father?” He spends the rest of the sea voyage in a “jumble of guilt and horror”. In his mind, he tries to justify his actions as self-defense, asking himself over and over which of them moved first, and is never able to come up with an answer. In other words, he does not consider himself righteous. There were no ideological deliberations, no principled commitment, no thoughts of rising up against colonialism: only “a split second of impulsive hatred”.

The events of the rest of the book lead on from this moment: hiding the body, joining Hermes in hiding, being betrayed by Letty, escaping and taking over Babel at gunpoint, the siege and the final self-destruction. From this point on, Robin is always reactive, and his hand is always forced by events. He has no idea where to go when they return to Oxford, and goes along when Hermes offers shelter. In the safe house, he is quietly horrified by Griffin’s love of guns, but learns to shoot one under Griffin’s bullying and cajoling, and out of an awareness that it might prove useful in his new status as a criminal. Having taken up violence, first impulsively, then hesitantly, he finally leans into it as a way of feeling some power and control over his fate, to make the deaths of his friends mean something, and to recast his patricide from an impulsive, shameful act, into the beginning of his struggle against colonialism. In the end, he seems to become amoral: when he decides to destroy the magical infrastructure keeping buildings and bridges standing, an ally suggests that he is going too far, and his response is a quotation from Caligula: “oderint dum metuant” (“let them hate, so long as they fear”). Caligula was the infamously deranged Roman emperor who planned to make his horse a senator, and Robin gets incredulous reactions to his quotation; he shrugs and says, “Caligula got his way.”

In short, I see Robin’s narrative as characterised by contingency and randomness. He does not grow in his realisation of colonial injustice until he makes a commitment to fight it; rather, he hovers indecisively between two worlds until he makes an impulsive mistake which pushes him into one side, and ends up progressively using more violence to retrospectively justify his previous actions. To my mind, his story does not support the titular “Necessity of Violence”. It does not succeed in justifying violence in the resistance of colonialism, or ennobling it, or even arguing that it is inevitable. All it does is shout very loudly that Colonialism Is Bad - not even in a way which addresses its consequences for the modern world, but merely reiterating that 19th Century Colonialism Was Terrible. In a 21st century book about race relations, this seems thoroughly outdated.

Ultimately, as he blows up the Institute around him, Robin’s thoughts return to his mother, and to his near death in Canton at the beginning of the book. “He remembered this now - he knew death … memories of a stale, hot room, of dreaming about the end. He remembered the stillness. The peace…” and he imagines his mother’s smile as he dies. Symbolically, Robin never outruns his guilt over surviving the epidemic where his Chinese family died. He never succeeds in bridging the gap between his Chinese and English influences, never builds an identity which incorporates both, nor one which depends on neither. His attempt to live life “dancing on the edges of two worlds” ends in a fall, and he inexorably returns to his roots in death. This message is fairly frustrating and counterproductive, considering how many members of Kuang’s (young, English-speaking, socially aware) audience are immigrants and mixed-race people who are trying to find their own place in the world. Interpreted as “all your attempts at reconciling your clashing cultures are doomed”, it’s toxic; interpreted as “doing this was impossible in the oppressive environment of the 19th century”, it’s outdated and irrelevant.

IIIb: Letty

Letty is the daughter of a British Navy Admiral. Her older brother studied Classics at Oxford, but found it difficult and neglected his studies in favour of wine parties, and ultimately died in one of his drunken stupors. Letty had always been brilliant, with a “prodigious memory”, excelling where her brother failed. Predictably, her father “said he’d never pay for a woman’s education, so I’m grateful for the scholarship. I had to sell a set of bracelets to pay for the coach fare up.” Once at Oxford, she bonds with Robin and the rest over being misfits and outsiders, sneaking into the kitchens with them at night to make Indian food with Ramy, debating literature and fielding their questions about the more obscure idiosyncrasies of English. Like Robin, she has for a long time craved her father’s approval and affection, and gotten none of it. She becomes part of the adopted family that makes Robin think, “by God, he would have killed for any of his cohort.”

Letty’s unrequited love for Ramy is only revealed at a party just before they leave for Canton; the night ends with her crying on Robin’s shoulder. She is kind to everyone in the group regardless, sharing her experiences as a sailor’s daughter to help them pack properly for the sea voyage. When the other three friends have a dispute about Hermes and stop talking to each other on the ship, Letty is left in the dark and has no idea why everyone is feuding, but refuses to be brushed off, talking to them one by one, working on them until they thaw and become friendly again. After Lovell’s death, she helps them dispose of the body, and goes into hiding with them in the Hermes safe house.

Conflict arises because she holds much rosier views of British society and justice than the others, and can’t understand or accept the degree of racism they have faced. After they dispose of the body, she advocates turning themselves in, saying that her father can use his political influence to have Lovell’s death explained away as an accident. The others explain that this might work if they were British, but as foreigners they will be considered guilty by default. In the Hermes safe house, when the others make plans to lobby and pressure Parliament, Letty shows a hopelessly optimistic faith in the British public: “have you ever considered you might better make your point by being nice?” Despite disagreements over methods, though, she seems sympathetic to the cause, and the others believe that she has thrown her lot in with them; Robin and a senior Hermes member say privately that she is the only English person they can “trust to do the right thing out of sympathy.” It is therefore all the more shocking when she betrays them to the authorities.

During the police raid, Letty holds her friends at gunpoint and demands that they hand over their list of Hermes operatives. All three of them lunge for the list at once, and in the confusion Letty shoots Ramy dead. This is no accident: although her initial reaction is shock, it is like Robin’s shock after killing Lovell. The narrator drives home the point by telling us that she is an excellent shot. When Robin confronts her at their final meeting, she does not try to deny it. “They both knew; there was no question” that she shot Ramy because he did not reciprocate her love.

During that final meeting, Letty demands that they surrender. She initially talks to them as friends, and shows concern for their wellbeing, but is clear that “her version of a successful resolution was to put them behind bars.” When they do not agree, she becomes contemptuous, and reverts to the pro-colonial position held by almost all the white British characters: the Empire will prevail, will crush them, and will ultimately possess “all the silver in the world”. She leaves, clearing the way for the army to attack the next morning.

On one level, Letty’s betrayal represents reverting to her race. In the same way that the colonialists in Canton dismiss the Chinese as inherently lazy and indolent, and Lovell accuses Robin of reverting to his “base original stock” despite his English upbringing, Letty returns to her racist English roots despite everything she and her classmates have been through together. To me, this is a fairly hypocritical thing to put in a book which is meant to critique racism. However, there are deliberate parallels to Robin’s killing of Lovell which suggest an alternative interpretation, that her betrayal wasn’t inevitable, wasn’t determined by the racial and political forces, but simply driven by spite and resentment of Ramy’s rejection. Perhaps, as with Robin, all the ideological arguments merely paper over the petty human emotions beneath. In that case, Letty’s narrative is just disappointing, and makes no contribution to the Big Important Themes of the book.

Part IV: Conclusion

“Babel” begins as a story of a talented orphan on his way to becoming a wizard, and ends in hatred, betrayal, and suicide. The magic is built on a fresh and exciting concept, inspired by a love of linguistics which shines through in every element. Unfortunately, its execution is riddled with inconsistencies: Kuang fails (or does not choose) to corral her enthusiasm into a coherent magic system, or develop it with the narrative in a satisfying way. As for the characters, the protagonist fails to resolve the contradictions of his Chinese roots and English education, and commits an impulsive murder, setting off a chain of events which lead him through amoral terrorism to death by magical suicide bombing. The white person who seems most likely to be on his side ends up betraying him, in a strange ambiguous superposition of reverting to the native racism of the English, and petty revenge for romantic rejection.

Depending on how you look at it, the main message of the book falls somewhere on a line between “white people are evil” and “19th century British colonialism was evil”. Clearly, only the latter is defensible. I’m not sure how many people in this day and age still need to hear that, but there are unlikely to be many of them in Kuang’s audience.

In my view, “Babel” does not succeed as a fantasy novel, a defense of the titular “Necessity of Violence”, or an insightful exploration of race relations. For an award-winning work in the 21st century, I found it pretty thoroughly disappointing. The one thing it does deliver is a collection of pretty interesting linguistic facts. If other ACX readers disagree, I’ll be interested to find out why in the comments. Otherwise, don’t bother with this book.

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