Babel, or the Necessity of Violence

Genre

Fantasy & Magical Realism

Publisher

Harper Voyager (HarperCollins)

Publication year

2022

ISBN

9780063021426

In an alternate 1830s, Robin Swift is taken from Canton to Oxford's Royal Institute of Translation, 'Babel', where the magic of silver-working, powered by meanings lost between languages, sustains the British Empire. As he learns his craft, Robin is drawn toward resistance. R. F. Kuang's novel...

R. F. Kuang builds her breakout novel on a seductive conceit: in an alternate nineteenth century, empires run on 'silver-working,' a magic drawn from the meanings that slip between translated words, and the world's finest translators are trained at Oxford's tower of Babel. Robin Swift, plucked from Canton as a boy, rises through that gilded institution only to grasp what his gift is really for - the extraction and domination on which British power depends. Babel is dark academia with a political conscience, marrying the pleasures of language, footnotes and cloistered study to a furious argument about colonialism, complicity and the violence beneath scholarship. Kuang is didactic by design, and readers who want ambiguity may bristle; those who share her anger will find it exhilarating and moving. The novel wears its erudition proudly while never forgetting to be a propulsive story of friendship and betrayal. A Nebula winner and word-of-mouth phenomenon, it is among the defining fantasy novels of the decade.