A review by brnineworms
Babel by R.F. Kuang

adventurous dark emotional informative reflective tense medium-paced

4.0

My greatest criticism of Babel is how didactic it is. You can get away with a few exposition dumps in academic settings, but the overexplaining is something else. An example: Ramy and Robin have very different personalities, partially informed by their different experiences of racism. Robin can (sometimes) pass as white, so his MO is to keep his head down and try to blend in for his own safety. Ramy doesn’t have that option so he instead adopts extravagant personas, pretending to be an Indian prince if it means white people will be more courteous to him. The reader should be able to recognise these different approaches and infer the reasoning without being prompted, but Kuang opts to make it explicit through dialogue as Ramy explains all this to Robin. Okay, fine. But then that’s immediately followed by another paragraph explaining the exact same thing again, this time through narration. It felt a little patronising to have it spelled out in such a way.

On the topic of telling instead of showing, I saw another review which said the main characters didn’t have much chemistry and we only know they’re friends who would die for each other because we’re told as much, not because we’re actually shown it and made to believe it. I don’t disagree, but I think it makes sense that these four traumatised and alienated bookworms would form weirdly intense clingy-yet-detached relationships with one another. Not speaking from experience at all, haha...

Likewise, the pacing is odd in a way that does make sense. The first half was slow and lecturey and kind of felt like a chore to read, and it was difficult to track the passage of time because the narrative would hover on a particular day or week or term then jump forward a few months seemingly at random. It threw me off at first, but it was effective in conveying the feeling of university passing in a blur, of it existing as a liminal period before adulthood.

After that there was a lot of action and fraught emotion, then the last few chapters trudged towards tragedy.

One aspect I thought was really cool was the way the narrative would get kind of unmoored from chronology when emotion was heightened; we’d be told how a character looks back on this event rather than being walked through how they experienced it in the moment.

I thought that was particularly effective in the Lovell murder scene, where we’re told the outcome before the scene can reach that point. We have the argument preceding the attack, but before the attack itself is described we have this interjection: “He would try desperately to justify what he’d done as self-defence, but such justification would rely on details he could hardly remember, details he wasn’t sure whether he’d made up to convince himself he had not really murdered his father in cold blood. // Over and over again he would ask himself who had moved first, and this would torture him for the rest of his days, for he truly did not know. // This he knew:” How great is that?

The scene that had me hooked –

when Robin confronted and ultimately killed Lovell

– didn’t happen until around the 60% mark; everything up until that point felt like backstory setting up the actual story. Which is fine when you do eventually get that payoff, but while reading it I got bored and impatient. I think Babel might be better suited to people who read quicker than I do.

All in all, it does (mostly) come together. There’s an inventive and interesting magic system with a lot of thought put into its implementation and implications. Kuang is obviously building on real world history and sociology but that’s not a bad thing. The book is maybe a little on the nose with some of its messaging but it’s a good read once it gets going.

CONTENT WARNINGS:

imperialism/colonialism, classism, misogyny, racism, child abuse (verbal and physical), a brief scene involving sexual harassment, emotional manipulation, drug use and addiction, anxiety/panic, suicide, death, some gore, torture, police brutality, gun violence, impending war, terrorism, slavery, white fragility