I pretty much hated this book, and I am struggling to understand why.
First of all, why would I expect to love this book? Well, what's not to love?
- Kuang is an award-winning author, whose books have been best-sellers. Those factors should mean that her books are both well-written and engaging.
- As far as topics go, Babel takes place in a fictionalized fantasy version of 19th Century Colonial Britain, featuring a hero who is a half-Chinese scholar born in Canton. It's an interesting setting, with an interesting premise.
- Kuang is a first generation American whose parents were born in China. She herself is a scholar of Chinese history and culture. The book should be told from a highly expert and insightful perspective.
- Babel features an anti-colonialist hero who first joins a secret society designed to undermine British hegemony, and then builds a student-worker coalition as part of a rebellion against colonialism.
All good, right?
Alas, in practise I stopped reading Kuang's first novel, The Poppy War, half-way through and I had the same impulse half-way through Babel.
This time pushed to the end, trying to understand what wasn't working for me.
It's not that Kuang is a young academic, and that her books show it. The protagonists of both the The Poppy War and Babel are brilliant, penniless young students, but the struggle of the heroine of The Poppy War to triumph in the imperial entrance exams kept my attention. So did the beginnings of the academic journey of the hero of Babel, who is scooped out of China as a young boy, and set to intensive study of Latin and Greek to prepare him for Oxford and his future at the Institute of Translation. Babel continued to hold my attention as 'Robin Swift' enters Oxford and encounters his first real friend -- fellow student Ramy-- and as together they build their academic careers through their first years of university.
But about half-way through Babel my interest really began to flag. There were lots of events -- so many events! So much drama! -- as Swift and his classmates struggle with various challenges at Oxford, year by year, and as Swift encounters his mysterious brother Griffen and the even more mysterious Hermes Society.
But at some point I stopped caring. Maybe there were simply too many events? It felt as if this story could have been several books. Or perhaps the problem is that Kuang should have pruned this story to create a more satisfying overall story arc. As it is now there were too many challenges, too many mini-crises and resolutions, with no clear emotional direction for the overall story.
It didn't help that I felt a limited emotional connection with the characters.
Only Robin our hero was fully-drawn. To a lesser extent Ramy also comes alive on the page. But we don't see enough of Griffen to understand him, or care about him and his passions. (When we finally do begin to understand Griffen, it's because Robin tells us about him, not because Kuang shows him to us.) Dr. Lovell is an evil colonialist. Letty is a caricature, and annoyingly, one whose character and life story don't feel true to 1830s England. Victoire hardly existed at all until the very last pages of the book.
Then there are the plot problems that start coming thick and fast from the midpoint onwards. Why would Babel overlook what seems to them to be Robin's treachery? Why do they also send the other 4th year students to China alongside Robin, when those student's skills are irrelevant to the project at hand? And how does it happen that four of the most brilliant scholars at Oxford are so beef-witted about covering up a crime?
And then Kuang suddenly kills off most of the characters to create a crisis point.
I 'm so old I remember when it was considered edgy to kill off central characters! But instead of it being a shock that enlivens the story, here killing off central characters feels like a contrivance -- one that makes it hard to feel invested in the story's ultimate outcome. It doesn't help that our hero claims to be devastated but we don't feel that devastation. Or that our Hero and his remaining brilliant colleagues (and their revolutionary working class allies) seem so naive about strategy.
Am I a curmudgeon? Undoubtedly. Can I write a book as good as R. F. Kuang's? Of course not. Will her writing improve as she matures and gains both more life experience and more writing experience? I hope so. Or maybe I am just being far too curmudgeonly in even saying that! She's writing relevant books that appeal to a best-selling-sized audience, an audience that cares more about her passion, her perspective, and her world-view than the flaws that I see.
Good for her. May she write many more. I just doubt that I'll read them.
----------------Addendum--------------------------------
I attended the Surrey Writer's Conference this past November, and a comment that Mary Robinette Kowal made there stuck with me. Roughly "Readers will love your work for what you do well."
Readers love R.F. Kuang for what she does well -- write stories from a uniquely Asian perspective, foregrounding the experience of People of Colour from non-Western cultures.
Babel does this extremely well -- it makes Imperial Victorian England an entirely new place to a Western reader situated in a culture that mostly sees this era through the eyes of contemporary authors like Dickens (where the Empire that makes his society possible is invisible) or modern authors like Neal Stephenson (who use the era to create a romanticized steampunk past).
Even the annoying ahistorical Lety serves a purpose in this perspective: she exists to allow Kuang to vividly illustrate the idea of 'white women's tears' and the impact on POC of supposed white allies who don't see their own privilege and whose words and actions centre their own experience instead of supporting those of POC.
I can see and appreciate those values. I took them too much for granted in my previous review, perhaps because there remains something about how Kuang paces her stories that really doesn't work for me, making me focus on all of the elements of her books that annoy me, instead of all of the things that she does really well.
