Books I Didn't Finish: Babel

After completely failing to connect with The Atlas Six, I was still in the mood for a vaguely “Dark Academia” flavoured alternate history fantasy. Luckily that describes roughly forty percent of the current genre market right now, so I wasn’t short on options. RF Kuang’s Babel got a huge amount of Buzz prior to release and had an interesting premise, so I chose that. Is it better than The Atlas Six?

Yes. Technically.

Babel is set in an alternate universe 19th century in which Britain’s status as a colonial powerhouse has been boosted by its mastery of a type of magic called silverworking, which uses both the metal itself and the properties of language to manifest alchemical-like effects. Our protagonist is a young boy from the Chinese city of Canton, who is rescued from certain death via plague by a mysterious English benefactor and whisked away to London, there to spend six years studying ancient Greek and Latin before going to Oxford to learn silverworking.

Taking on the name Robin Swift, the boy quickly realizes that his rescue and subsequent move to London are part of a grander scheme on the part of his benefactor, who might also be his biological father. I didn’t get far enough in to learn more about that though, because this book insisted on wasting my God damn time.

Sorry, getting ahead of myself.

Babel has a fascinating alternate history setting, an interestingly low-key magic system that the book (at least in the part I read) doesn’t over-explain, and an intriguing story that engages with a lot of complex themes around colonialism, race and politics. It squanders most of that on a set of opening chapters that are so fucking dull, I had to force myself to keep going with it like I was wading through half-dried cement.

After the quite exciting opening where Robin is plucked out of plague-stricken Canton, we settle into a long bit where he wanders around London, discovers the magic of scones, reads books and…that’s pretty much it. During these scenes the book drily lists off a bunch of references to historical events and personages that a general reader is likely to recognize.

This is pretty much the only way the book tries to bring its setting to life, 19th century London reduced to a handful of encyclopedia paragraphs. Canton is even more non-existant, and Oxford is scarcely better. This is bad enough in a straightforward historical novel, let alone a historical fantasy novel.

It doesn’t help that during the opening chapters Robin has no real personality beyond “is a child” (this is a common problem with stories that start out with their protagonist as a kid, I’ve found) and then doesn’t develop much beyond that after the six year time skip.

The book does engage with some interesting themes during these chapters: colonialism, racism, language. But these themes are presented similarly to the setting detail. The book engages language by having Robin stand around thinking about etymology, it engages with colonialism by having Robin overhear the adults talk about doing colonialism, it engages racism with scenes where people are racist at Robin. During all of this Robin, our central character, is usually a blank void who barely reacts to anything going on around him.

The bit that really broke my patience with the book is where Robin discovers (via overhearing a conversation, of course) that his English mentor might be his father and seems to have taken in other children for training similarly to Robin in the past. He responds to this revelation by deliberately and consciously deciding not to try and investigate further in any way.

There are fairly sensible emotional reasons for why he does this, but come on—I can tell when an author is trying to save a big twist for later in the story, even when it’s not as obvious as this. 

This refusal to engage with the plot in order to string the reader along, coupled with the glacial pacing and focus on worldbuilding and setting detail over story, put me uncomfortably in mind of a certain other magical academic fantasy boy–although I hasten to add that Babel is far better written, and seems to have more of an actual plot, than the adventures of Kvothe the red-haired guitarist fuckboi. The similarity just didn’t help, given how little Babel was holding my interest for other reasons.