Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.
I was granted complimentary eARC access to Babel by R. F. Kuang through participation in the HarperCollins Canada Influencer program following attendance of the #FrenzyPresents summer catalogue preview. Thank you to the team at HCC for arranging these ARC opportunities for us! My thoughts are my own and my review is honest.
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About the Book
Babel, or The Necessity of Violenc
An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution
by R.F. Kuang
Publishing 23 August 2022
Harper Voyager
Genre: Historical Fantasy, Magical Realism, Dark Academia
Page Count: 560
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Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.
1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation — also known as Babel.
Babel is the world’s center of translation and, more importantly, of silver-working: the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation through enchanted silver bars, to magical effect. Silver-working has made the British Empire unparalleled in power, and Babel’s research in foreign languages serves the Empire’s quest to colonize everything it encounters.
Oxford, the city of dreaming spires, is a fairytale for Robin; a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge serves power, and for Robin, a Chinese boy raised in Britain, serving Babel inevitably means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to sabotaging the silver-working that supports imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide: Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence? What is he willing to sacrifice to bring Babel down?
Babel — a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal response to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell — grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of translation as a tool of empire.
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My Review
My Rating: 5 Stars
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I was granted complimentary eARC access to Babel by R. F. Kuang through participation in the HarperCollins Canada Influencer program following attendance of the #FrenzyPresents summer catalogue preview. Thank you to the team at HCC for arranging these ARC opportunities for us! My thoughts are my own and my review is honest.
Babel is a brilliant, unique dark academia novel of magical realism and historical fantasy flavouring. 19th Century Oxford, and England around it, runs on silver magic unlocked by the work of translators. Who are these translators? Students plucked from their homelands around the world at a young age, re-educated in English society with their British caretakers or owners, and sent to college to learn their trade. The magic works best when connections are made by native speakers of the various languages, you see. All of that is fine and dandy, but as many such students studying in the tower soon come to realize and unpack, they’re working to produce magic that only benefits the wealthy White gentry who stole them and refuse to help their family and neighbours in their homelands. Can you say revolution? It’s not going to be pretty!
I love pretty much everything about this book. The idea of magic that can only be wielded by multilingual masters of both living and historic languages is fascinating! If I were a young scholar in this version of the 19th century, I would have been doing everything in my power to get into that program! Fortunately for me, and also something I absolutely loved in this book, was the “open secret” of female attendance at the college. There is a surprising number of female characters for a book set at a British school in the 19th century, and that’s just plain awesome.
More importantly than those things that are simply cool, this book has a lot to say, to speculate on, and to dismantle about racism, colonialism, slavery, and sexism. This is the story of abducted, enslaved, and abused students of ethnic minorities, mixed race, and the female persuasion rising up to burn everything down around them because there’s nothing worth saving about the system that oppresses them and uses their work to benefit only those who have held them in this state of oppression.
One little “nit-pick” of sorts surrounds an off-hand remark between two of the students while they’re figuring out what to do next after the cogs of revolution start turning. One suggests fleeing to Canada and the other notes that “none of us speak French.” This book starts off in 1828 as young Robin is whisked off to England, and the bulk of the book is no more than a decade later. “Canada” is still a collection of colonies with the semi-autonomous rule at this point and only the portion known as Lower Canada (now today’s Quebec) was officially Francophone. Had they gone with this plan they could have gone to Upper Canada (Ontario) or any of the Atlantic colonies that were in talks to join “Canada” at this point and got along just fine speaking English. Source: I’m Canadian and I spent the late 2000s studying for a BA in History, Canadian & British focus.
I’ll admit that while it’s been on my TBR for quite some time, I haven’t read The Poppy War series yet. I was so excited to hear that Kuang was releasing a new stand-alone because that meant I could finally jump in on this popular author without needing the time to commit to an entire series. Having read Babel, I’ll definitely be bumping The Poppy War much higher up the TBR list!
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