Book Review by K.S.Loganathan.
R.F.Kuang is an American novelist. In Babel, a dark academia fantasy set in 1830s England, she grapples with the themes of British imperialism, racism and capitalism and the role of the English universities in colonization wielding language as power . In the book, language translation is weaponized to serve the aims of the Empire. Languages determine the ethnicity and identity of peoples, and as each language unlocks a culture , it also provides the key to enslaving the native speakers .
The alchemic properties of translation as described in the book come with the use by the English of enchanted silver bars inscribed with ‘ matched pairs’ of words that have similar but not identical meanings in two different languages . They act as a force multiplier to increase industrial and agricultural productivity, influence the trajectories of bullets ,heal injuries etc. The Oxford University Royal Institute of Translation , nicknamed Babel , is the factory where language scholars are working to find the matched pairs , and monetize their uses in the cause of the Empire and at the same time achieve social engineering with English at its core.
The story is the bildungsroman of a Sino-English orphan renamed Robin Swift, who is taken in as a ward by Professor Richard Lovell. The professor arranges his tuitions in Latin, Greek and Mandarin and in time his admission into Babel. Robin’s classmates are Ramy from Calcutta, Victoire from Haiti, and Letty from England. They are tasked with developing translations of “exotic” languages like Mandarin, Haitian Creole, and Arabic alongside the Indo- European languages for finding matched pairs.
Robin is recruited early on by his elder half- brother Griffin into the Hermes Society, an underground organization seeking to undermine Britain’s imperial expansion.He “dances on the razor’s edge of contradictory sides” , being English and Chinese, wanting the comforts of the one and being loyal to the other : matters come a head when Britain clashes with China over balance of trade in Silver and access to free trade in Opium.
The Anglicist Lord Macaulay declared at the time ‘ We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern- a class of persons Indian in blood and colour , but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.’ A merican Activist Rebecca Solnit writes in the present day that ‘the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality’. Ramy thought his tenure at Oxford is a betrayal of his race and religion, because he had become just that class of person Macaulay hoped to create.The translators’ campus activism would in time explode to destroy many landmarks and lose many lives in defiance of the Empire.
The book had a short run at the New York Times bestseller list and won two awards. It is a scholarly exposition on linguistics, etymology and translations with numerous footnotes and a close- to- the- history narration of events. It critiques colonialism and capitalism in the 2020s fashion . However the characters fail to grip the reader ,and there are no iconic friendships as the scholars are shoehorned into radicalism .The depiction of the English for the most part is as perfidious Albion . Kuang does not build an alternative world in 1830s Oxford . The story is told mainly from Robin Swift’s point of view, which rather biases the narrative and precludes a balanced presentation . The English characters are lackluster and presented in a poor light. The book would have justified its hype if it were less didactic, and the worldbuilding had been more fantastic.
