Book Review: Babel - R. F. Kuang

This is an astonishing book. On the one hand, it's the basic "Harry Potter" trope - a young orphan is gifted, gets sent to school to learn magic, becomes pals with the other weird kids, has adventures, and fights a monster. Except here, Harry is Chinese, is sent to Oxford University to learn magic, and faces up to the reality of colonialism and Empire.

Oh, and the magic is based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

I lived in Oxford for several years (although, thankfully, I wasn't a scholar) and Kuang has perfectly captured the madness of the city. Her world-building is delightfully realistic and the parenthetical footnotes sprinkled throughout lead to a mesmerising blurring of reality and fiction. When you read sentences like "Phonological calques are often semantic calques as well." it often feels like you're receiving an education as well as experiencing the narrative flow.

The book's politics aren't subtle - but they needn't be. This isn't smuggled polemic; it is righteous fury bound into a novel and set loose on an unsuspecting world. It is the very essence of what it means to be "woke". Our characters gradually have the scales drop from their eyes and they begin to realise the nightmare world they live in.

A thoroughly entertaining read, with a perfect mixture of alternative history, science-fantasy, heartbreak, and wonder.

On a minor technical note - the publishers have rendered all the Chinese characters as tiny images which makes it hard to read them. A bit of a baffling editorial decision!