A couple of years ago I got deep into Booktok, and I read a lot of “dark academia” novels that became popular on that platform. I realised quite quickly that I wasn’t really enjoying many of the books I was being recommended, and I also stopped using TikTok quite so much, and so I haven’t really engaged with that platform in a while. Right as I was disconnecting from those spaces R.F. Kuang’s Babel, or the Necessity of Violence was becoming popular and I sort of dismissed it as yet another BookTok trend that I wasn’t particularly interested in. Since then, though, people I know have told me that they think I’d enjoy it, and reading The Skin and Its Girl recently, which references the tower of Babel quite regularly, brought it back into the forefront of my mind. I figured it was time to finally sit down with it and see what all the fuss is about.

Babel opens with an author’s note titled “Author’s Note on Her Representations of Historical England, and of the University of Oxford in Particular”, in which Kuang speaks directly to people who would approach the book in bad faith or quibble about the ‘historical accuracy’ in this fantasy novel. It opens with the following passage:

Kuang follows this by talking about some of the changes she has made to the real Oxford in her presentation of it in the novel, as well as by citing several sources. She ends by telling us that if we “find any other inconsistencies, feel free to remind yourself that this is a work of fiction”.

My immediate reaction to this introduction was that it felt very strange and overly defensive in a sort of hostile way. As someone who’s spent many, many years dealing with Twitter users who think they know better than everyone around them about literally every topic, it read like it as written by someone who has also spent far too much time on social media and has been trained to account for bad faith reads every time they open their mouths. My longer-term reaction, somewhat perversely, was that going into the book with this assumption of bad faith actually made me want to read it more critically than I might otherwise have done. And that’s a shame, because largely I really enjoyed Babel and that experience was slightly marred by my sudden urge to check facts and to wonder whether this thing was accurate or not. I don’t think I would have had that experience had I not first read the author’s introduction, and I honestly wish I’d skipped it on my initial read.

My main complaint about Babel is that I don’t think it goes far enough. In the two years since it was published it’s garnered a lot of attention online from (mostly) white people who seem upset about the way it portrays the colonial attitudes of the British empire. Looking at the one-star reviews of this book on Goodreads is to look into a world where people are deeply, personally offended by white English people being the villains of a novel about the British empire and the beginnings of the Opium Wars. And yet when I actually read the book I found that it’s not particularly inflammatory at all. The white English people who serve as the villains aren’t portrayed particularly unfairly, and they’re not cartoon villains. If anything, the people who are portrayed cartoonishly or with simplistic motivations are the members of the Hermes Society who don’t seem to have any real understanding of how to make revolutionary action actually work.

Part of where I don’t think the book goes far enough is in its attitude to class, and one of the best examples of this is, I think, in how Kuang talks about food. Food is mentioned quite often in the novel, with characters regularly lamenting how bland and unseasoned British food is. Kuang writes:

This in itself is a very “American on Twitter” way of talking about British food, frankly, but it also betrays a lack of understanding - or at least a lack of interest - in the way this lack of seasoning is integrated into ideas of class. The fact of the matter is that when spices were still expensive and exclusive to the upper classes, the British did season their food. Once spices began to be more commonly available - a direct result of the colonialist extraction that’s at the heart of the novel - the British upper classes began to shun them as being common. This is when we begin to see the ‘theory of taste’ begin to emerge, in which the upper classes decided that things should ‘taste like themselves’ rather than being infused with spices. I had wondered if this was the sort of information that might show up in a footnote, since it feels directly relevant to the novel’s main thesis, but apparently not.

Something I’ve heard from many people about this novel is that it’s in conversation with Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which is one of my favourite books. On the surface that appears to be true. It’s set at roughly the same time period (give or take twenty years), it’s an alternate history in which the British Empire reinforces their power with magic, and it contains footnotes. But that is honestly where the similarities end, and it’s also part of what makes me wish the book went a little further. Norrell is absolutely riddled with footnotes, you can barely turn the page without seeing a new one, and they’re all in-world. They all serve to further every single theme in the book, and do a lot of world-building that makes Clarke’s vision of a magically-enhanced Empire seem real.

In comparison Babel’s footnotes feel very thin on the ground. I wanted the book to be dense with references and supplementary material, but they don’t show up anywhere near as frequently as they could do. And when they do there’s a split between footnotes that talk about fictional in-universe matters, and footnotes that make reference to the actual truth of the matter. I’m not opposed to the latter, especially in a book that’s overtly concerned with social commentary - the footnotes in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars are breathtaking and stuck with me long after I’d forgotten the events of the book, for example. But many of Kuang’s footnotes simply serve to point out where the author is being particularly clever, or to drive home a point that was already very clear on the page. Many times when I read them I was reminded of the author’s introduction, and I couldn’t help coming away with the sense that many of the footnotes exist because Kuang doesn’t trust her readers. And that’s a shame.

Interestingly, rather than being in conversation with Norrell I often felt that Babel was more in conversation with - or had more in common with - the Harry Potter books, to the extent that some parts of the novel actually read like they could have come from fanfic. (This is not, to be clear, an inherently bad thing, and this isn’t a criticism. Very well-written fic exists and I have read a lot of it). When you set a novel in a pseudo-Victorian magical boarding school you will obviously always draw comparisons to the wizard books, but here the similarities go beyond the surface, from the broad to the specific. Our protagonist is an orphan plucked from a life of, if not poverty, then hardship, at the age of 11 to enter a world beyond his wildest imagination, where he’s told that magic exists and that he may one day learn how to use it. He spends his days at an expensive school where he never has to want for anything and never questions where his money comes from. Our protagonists steal food from the kitchens.

There are even elements that feel like references, like Robin living at number 4 Magpie Lane rather than number 4 Privet Drive, or a teacher being named Professor Felton (potentially named for Tom Felton, who played Potter fanfic authors’ perennial favourite bad boy, Draco Malfoy). At one point the protagonists plan to climb to the top of the tower to look at stars through the telescopes there, which a footnote tells us only exist because “In the mid-eighteenth century, Babel scholars were briefly seized by an astrology fad, and several state-of-the-art telescopes were ordered for the roof on behalf of scholars who thought they could derive useful match-pairs from the names of star signs. These efforts never yielded anything interesting, as astrology is fake, but the stargazing was pleasant”. Despite the footnote it seems to me that the telescopes on the top of the tower only exist because Kuang wanted to make reference to stargazing from the roof of the astronomy tower.

Once I’d made this Potter connection I started to see it everywhere. Parts of the writing felt like they could have been pulled from those books, like this passage that you could probably convince me came from Order Of The Phoenix:

I was even able to predict one of the large plot points in the later parts of the book almost perfectly because I drew a parallel between Letty’s father and Marietta Edgecombe’s mother. I’m aware that Kuang has talked about grappling with what to do with her Harry Potter memorabilia post-Rowling revealing herself to be a horrible person in an interview with Clarkesworld, so I don’t think I’m entirely misguided in thinking that some elements of Potter fandom may have made it into her work. (I, too, have had to go through a process of divorcing myself from those books, which meant a lot to me when I was younger).

One criticism I’ve seen repeated a lot is that all of the characters sound like they’ve stepped out of the 2020s with the exception of the white men, who all speak like they’re in the 1830s. I was looking for this as I read it, and honestly I disagree. The book does feel very modern and anachronistic, yes - at one point Letty shoots someone “a droll look” and says “Say more”, which is a very modern turn of phrase - but I don’t think that’s a flaw and I don’t think the white people in the novel sound any different to any other character. In fact Letty is, very much, one of the white people who turn out to be villains, yet here she’s speaking like she has a Twitter account.

This goes back to my earlier discussion of whether this is in conversation with Norrell or Harry Potter. Where Norrell is written in more time-appropriate language, Babel is very much a piece of modern commercial fiction. It’s written well, and Kuang has a very distinct voice, but despite being set in the 1830s this is not historical fiction - and that’s not just fine, I think it’s intentional and I think it’s something Kuang addresses in the text, albeit quite obliquely.

There’s a moment when the characters discuss the nature of translation, and Professor Playfair addresses the idea of fidelity of faithlessness in translation. We’re treated to this exchange:

After more discussion, we eventually come to the conclusion that “Either you situate the text in its time and place, or you bring it to where you are, here and now. You’re always giving something up”. In Babel, then, what we see is not an attempt to portray a realistic 1830s Oxford. Kuang tells us explicitly in her introduction that this isn’t the case. Instead what we’re seeing is 1830s Oxford and the politics of colonialism being brought to where we are, in order to make a point to modern readers.

I said at the start of this review that the defensiveness of the introduction led me to read the book more critically than I might otherwise have done, and I don’t want to give the impression that I didn’t like it or don’t think it’s a worthwhile read. Frankly, I wouldn’t generally spend my time writing several thousand words about something I didn’t like. Many of the best books I’ve read this year have explored the experience of Middle- and Far-Eastern immigrants to the United States or the effects of colonialism on indigenous peoples - C Pam Zhang’s How Much Of These Hills Is Gold , Sarah Cypher’s The Skin And Its Girl , Tiffany Morris’ Green Fuse Burning - and I was really looking forward to reading something that turns that lens on my own culture and history. In saying that I wish the book had gone further, part of what I’m saying is that I went into Babel with a desire for the text to make me feel uncomfortable about my identity as a white British person, and I’m a little disappointed that it didn’t hit me harder. But with that aside, this was a joy to read. Kuang’s prose is strong and I felt immersed in her world.

The novel is definitely at its best in the front half as we get situated in Oxford and spend time with Robin and his friends as they study. The academic setting really shines and, as a former Potter fan who no longer reads those books, this felt very familiar and comforting in a lot of ways. The plot falters a little once the revolution begins, unfortunately, and I found the siege of the tower at the end of the book to be one of the weakest parts of the novel, but the nearly 600 pages rattled by at an unbelievable pace and I was left feeling very glad that I finally got around to reading this.