For this month's science fiction and fantasy book club, I read Babel by R. F. Kuang.

tl;dr I rate the book 2 stars.

Plot

This story follows the life of Robin, an immigrant to England in the early 1800s. Okay, immigrant hides the details: his father, Richard Lovell, a white British man, took Robin from China, at a young age, after the death of Robin's Chinese family. Lovell never acknowledges Robin as his own, raising Robin to become a translator in service of the British empire.

Which is a good segue to the core of the book: translation is the key to magic, in this alternate history. Translation from one language to another, some word or phrase, is never perfect, never one-to-one.¹ Something is lost in the process. That something becomes magic. The practical requirements of the magic is to inscribe the words into silver bars, and then speak the words (requiring fluency in each language for it to work). For the British, translating between diverse languages such as English, Mandarin and Urdu provides enormous opportunity for new magical applications.

Robin spends his formative years studying, isolated away from the world by Lovell. Then, he goes to Oxford, to study at the prestigious Institute of Translation, whose building is named Babel. At Oxford, Robin befriends his cohort, fellow translation students: Ramy, Letty, and Victoire. Ramy and Victoire are also transplants from their native countries, and all four bond over their experiences at Babel.

Almost immediately upon arriving at Oxford, Robin meets his doppelganger in the midst of a crime: Griffin is Robin's half brother, Lovell's previous attempt to bring Chinese students to Babel. Griffin has however left academia to fight against the tyranny of Babel and all it stands for and supports, namely the British empire. Griffin belongs to a group named the Hermes society, an underground movement fighting against the British empire.

Fast forward 3 years and several hundred pages.

Robin kills Lovell in the heat of an argument. This forces the four students to go into hiding, linking up with the Hermes society. Hermes gears up its fight to prevent war between Britain and China. Letty betrays Hermes, leading to the death of Ramy. Griffin breaks Robin and Victoire out of jail, and dies in the process.

Robin and Victoire occupy Babel, joined by sympathetic students and teachers. Without Babel, silver-magic-powered carts, roads, mills, bridges and so on start to malfunction or collapse. British troops siege the tower. Victoire leaves, and Robin destroys the tower by translating the untranslatable - translation itself - leading to a chain reaction as all the silver in the tower explodes.

What I liked

The core of the plot has potential. A group of students, overcome with sympathy for an oppressed people, hatch a scheme to overthrow the seat of magical power in an empire. As the crisis of war looms, and peaceful efforts fail, facing internal betrayal, the remaining few sacrifice themselves to blow up the tower of Babel - representing both a physical and metaphysical attack on the empire.

Unfortunately, what I liked ends there - the potential was there, but the execution faltered.

What I didn't like

The pacing of the story ruined any possibility of enjoyment. As even a positive reviewer described it, the book is dry. Several hundred pages could have been summarized and shortened to produce a better rhythm. The comparison with the most recent book I read, Embassytown, is stark: whereas Embassytown was too dense for its own good, Babel is too long.

Another annoyance is the footnotes. Some footnotes explain a particular translation - fair enough. But others provide character motivations, background, history, etc. - content that should be woven into the main text! I see it as a failure on the author's part if they rely on footnotes. For perspective, I have read some works of Richard Francis Burton, so I am well versed in footnotes filling more than half of a page. His footnotes are decorative, optional, complementary - not providing core context to the plot.

I also felt the characters were one dimensional. Either they were on the side of the good, or on the side of evil. And the author left no room for ambiguity. I had no doubt which way Robin's sympathies would turn as the novel grinded on. The betrayal by Letty felt awkward and forced, shoe-horned in to make a point. I would have appreciated more depth to Lovell, who plays such a crucial role in the story: how did he come to be so evil?

Finally, I was frustrated by the loose ends of the plot. Robin's family dies in a disease outbreak - but Lovell is conveniently nearby? It's implied the realization is that Lovell could have saved Robin's family - but I am left wondering, did Lovell intentionally kill Robin's family? The other loose end was the romance between Robin and Ramy - it's only hinted upon a few times, but it's just begging for exploration. Why not develop the romance? At least to satisfy the readers' curiosity.

The in-between

One aspect I struggled with was how to interpret the story. Robin is traumatized an early age with the loss of his family, and then continually abused and neglected by Lovell. Robin murders his own father, falls in with a band of violent revolutionaries, and sacrifices himself for the movement. This is a terribly tragic story, and arguably motivates the question of the subtitle: the necessity of violence. When I think of violence in history, of strikes, revolts and revolutions, I don't take into account the tragedies that put the actors on that specific stage. I focus on the poetry of high ideals, of justice and courage and brotherhood.

Conclusion

All in all, I don't recommend this book - it's not worth the time investment to read.