 It's okay that you love Babel. Inspiration from, and that is inherently ridiculous to me. You can't expect me not to pick it apart when it makes no sense. Babel by RF Kwong was the one of the biggest, most hyped releases of the year. Something told me that I, for some reason, I didn't think that I would love it that much, but I was still feeling the hype. I was excited. I ordered the Waterstones edition. It's a very pretty book, I think we can all agree. The one thing that I think we can all agree about is that every edition of Babel is gorgeous, which it makes me sad that I did not like this book because I would love to prominently display this beautiful book on my shelf. But alas, I don't normally script book reviews. I don't normally put a bunch of disclaimers on my book reviews, but this book being the book that it is, I feel that that's necessary. So, disclaimers. If you don't like or can't handle hearing somebody criticize a book that you love, then do yourself and me a favor and don't watch this video because I'm going to be extremely critical of Babel. And it's okay that you love Babel. And if you don't wanna hear somebody criticizing it, then just don't watch this video, okay? Next disclaimer, I love the idea and ideas in this book or that this book was attempting to handle. I think the idea of exploring colonialism and bringing that into dark academia, in general, that I think is a fantastic idea. And I think that those ideas are pretty compatible. The positions espoused by this book, the arguments made by this book, these are positions that I largely agree with. The historical time period and everything to do with it, this book is drawing inspiration from, it will become clear later why I put quotes around that. I do think it's a fascinating period of history. It has a lot of darkness, tragedy, it's layered, it's complex, generally speaking, great fodder for a compelling novel. Disclaimers about me going into this book, I previously did have some issues with Kuang's writing style in the Paviwark trilogy. I liked the first book the best. And thereafter, I felt that the characters were extremely one note, particularly the main character who seemed to do all of her growing and changing in the first book reached her final form by the end of it and then just kind of stayed like that. And for me, as a character-driven reader, I found that incredibly boring. I'm here to see how these characters are affected by this story, how the characters react to the events that happen around them. I had hoped that the character work would be stronger in Babel because this is a later book. Authors are always hopefully growing and improving. Dark academia, by its very nature, is, in my opinion, or should be, much, much more character-driven than a big war epic, which is more what the Paviwark is. So while I had trepidation about this, I had reason to believe that it could be a lot better in Babel, and it should be. And lastly, the biggest issue with me going into this book, setting it up for failure ultimately, I think, is the fact that the blurb for the book states that it is a thematic response to the secret history and a tonal response to Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Now, if I'm gonna speak entirely candidly, that 100% rubbed me the wrong way. I think it's incredibly egotistical to say something like that, to draw comparisons to books like that, to other well-loved, well-regarded, and much revered, some would say masterpieces. To say that you drew inspiration from that, or that you were inspired by that, okay, I guess, you're inviting the comparison then, but okay. But to say that you are responding to it, insinuating there is something wrong with it that you're gonna set right, and to basically put your book, setting it at a level with those two other books, the egotism of that really, really irritated me. And for people now drawing comparisons to these books, I have heard people say, oh, it's not fair to compare it to the secret history. It's not fair to compare it to Jonathan Strange or Mr. Norrell. Well, normally I would say, okay, I guess that's, I guess, but in this case, she invited the comparison herself by pitching the book this way. And if you're gonna compare your book and say it's a response to these well-revered, modern classics, you better walk the walk. So picking up Babel, more so than I would have, if she had not said that, I was basically thinking, okay, prove yourself to me now. You've said all this about yourself. You've said all this about this book. I have pretty high expectations now, which you have, you've set that bar for yourself. So I feel like that's not really my fault if I had much, much higher expectations of this book because you didn't say, hey, I wrote a book and I think it's pretty good, here you go. You said, I'm responding to these great classics. I'm gonna show them how it's done. So, okay, you better, you better have something great here. The next thing I wanna talk about is something that is, I think important for you to know about me as a reader. And it is to do with magic words as a magic system. So Babel does use magic words more or less as its magic system. And this is a type of magic system that I, at all times, have a great deal of problems with. Not just in Babel, although Babel, I think, is particularly bad. But this being your magic system is already going to be a hard sell for me. So I wanna explain why that is and what I mean, I guess, by magic words because I discovered that people didn't automatically know what I meant by that when I said that elsewhere. So magic words meaning in a fantasy story where the saying of a set of words, a word out loud is what results in a magic thing happening. Obviously there's a lot of different versions of this, a lot of different authors handle it in different ways and the reason for why this is working the way that it is varies a great deal. But in essence, magic words is exactly what it sounds like. It's, I said Alakazam and because I said Alakazam, a magic thing happened. So why do I have a big, big, big problem with magic words? So magic of any kind in any book and any speculative project requires a pretty substantial amount of suspension of disbelief. And that being the case, my reading of it and the way it is often handled in books is where it comes across almost as a otherworldly science that is not completely or fully understood by its users be it physics, chemistry or biology. So physics think like elemental magic. Chemistry would be like magical elixirs and potions. Biology is magical bodies. So when the character, they themselves, are innately magical. We can understand this as there is something about this body in this environment that we can't really say that that's impossible because we humans in this plane do not have whatever it is in this body that makes them able to influence the world around them. So that's in essence how I understand it. And if they say it's magic in their world, okay, I mean, historically speaking, magic was used as a justification for why a lot of things we didn't understand how they worked. So that's essentially how I think of magic and other stories where something is making this work. And if you don't know how it works fully but you're able to get the result that you want because you do these steps although you don't exactly know why that works the way that it does just that it does. That doesn't mean to me that there is no explanation for it in this universe. This is possible somehow. So just because they don't know exactly why it functions this way doesn't mean that there isn't an explanation for it at a atomic chemical, whatever level. And that's why I'm able to suspend disbelief because even if that's kind of far-fetched to think that, you know, like a magical body has the ability to levitate. I mean, like that does seem far-fetched, but okay, like I don't know that there's not something in this body that makes them levitate. So I guess they can levitate. There's something in their body that makes them able to do that. It seems far-fetched that a body would have the capability to affect wind and water but I don't know, I don't have that in my body but you're telling me this body can, okay? So there's something in their body that enables them to do that. So then we come to magic words as a magic system and that is inherently ridiculous to me. You're telling me something in the natural world is sentient, understands language and is nitpicky and requires language to be used in a specific order under precise circumstances such as, you know, a spoken during a full moon or while holding a wand after giving blood or whatever. But it's the saying of words that then something in the natural world is like, aha, I hear you saying the right words in the right order. It is time to do the thing that you require. That is inherently ridiculous to me. Again, like this differs from the other kinds of magic I described because a magical object, a magical elixir, a magical body, there is the possibility that you could interpret this as being scientifically discoverable as scientifically explainable if it was studied long enough at a, you know, a molecular level, perhaps, that there is some property to this object that doesn't exist in our world that influences things. There's some property of this magical body that doesn't exist in our world that influences things. But to say that words spoken out loud are understood by wind or water or whatever it is that you're controlling with your words is ridiculous to me. Now if magic words are used as a way for a magic user to kind of focus the mind, then it becomes more like a mantra, so to speak. I can buy that because then it's, again, it's more the magical body, but then they require deep focus and concentration and the saying of these magic words helps to put them in the right mind to tap into this thing that's in them that makes them able to do magic. But a spell cast via spoken or written word, that's just dumb to me. So do I hate every single book that involves or uses or relies on magic words as a magic system? No, no I don't. There's a lot of books that I like that do have magic words in them. Most of the time, either I like the book despite that, there's not enough other things going for it that I forgive that about it, and or it has in it some mitigating factor, either acknowledging in the text in some way the kind of inherent absurdity of this as a magic system, or if it's told in a way that it's clearly relying on traditional understandings of magic, it is meant to be read as kind of folkloric and the magic system itself is not being described or explained or invented by the author. For example, like, you know, which is reading from a grimoire, this is a very traditional understanding of magic, so if you're just kind of relying on this general traditional understanding of that, well, not my favorite, I'll understand that what you're doing is playing on this traditional idea of a witch, not inventing a magic system in which we read words off of these a favor and magic happens. Examples of books that I love that kind of acknowledge the inherent absurdity of that as a magic system are Harry Potter and the Simon Snow books. Jinky Rowling's awful, but I did enjoy Harry Potter, so, and it does use magic words, but early on in the books, magic is often kind of tongue in cheek. The names of spells is kind of plain for a laugh. It's kind of a joke a lot of the time. Later on in the series, actually the books get quite serious and I feel like that's when they kind of lose it because you've set up a lot of things to be kind of nonsense, and now we're supposed to take it super seriously, which is kind of, there's a lot of reasons the later Harry Potter books don't work for me that well, but that's one of them. You know, having a spell that's Oculus Reparo to fix someone's glasses, I mean, that's kind of inherently kind of silly. It's meant to be read that way. And it's doing also the thing of playing on tradition. So it's not that she's invented an entire magic system. She's playing for a laugh. Again, the idea that witches and wizards have hats and they do potions and like just lots and lots of traditional understandings of magic are just kind of playing off of that. That's what it's doing. And it's not really taking that seriously. The mechanics of it aren't really described because that's not really what it's trying to do. And then Simon Snow is basing itself on Harry Potter, which is basing itself on these things. So, and Simon Snow is itself kind of playing Harry Potter for a laugh and Harry Potter plays magic for a laugh. And so, so there you go. But that being said, the magic system in the Simon Snow books genuinely makes more sense than that in Harry Potter or that in Babel. I'm not joking about that. It does make more sense. I'm not saying it's a super amazing, brilliant hard magic system that is up there with anything Sanderson could invent, although I also didn't have problems with Sanderson magic systems. But anyway, no, I'm not saying that, but I'm saying like that's how bad the Babel magic system is because the one in the joke book carry on makes more sense. Another example is Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, the book that she's supposedly responding to. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell acknowledges the inherent absurdity in magic words, how they magic system, and in a lot of the magic that it's doing, it kind of plays it sardonicly kind of tongue where the characters themselves of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell themselves, they are kind of ridiculous figures. And it's a lot of sarcasm and a lot of sort of witty ribbing throughout the book, making fun of British etiquette and things like that. And again, it's doing the thing of playing off of traditional understandings of magic, English historical ideas of magic, of lore and myth surrounding magic users such as Merlin and things like that. And playing on those ideas, magic is never explained in this book because the practice of magic is itself acknowledged to be kind of ridiculous. The magic users themselves are kind of ridiculous. And what the book is really about is different kind of approaches to thinking, different approaches to pursuit and scholarly study. The idea that Mr. Norrell is like, you have to do it by the rules, you have to read the book, you have to do it by the manual. And that Jonathan Strange is the wild whimsical one that invents out of whole cloth. And it's like, who cares what the rule book says? I do whatever I want. It's about that dichotomy, not about the actual mechanics of how they are actually doing magic. Lord of the Rings is again presented where magic is not the focal point. It exists in the world. It is presented more as myth and folklore. It is presented as an unknowable mystery. Sometimes there is a speaking of a magical word, but this is not what is predominantly happening in the narrative. This is not what our most of our main characters are doing. And the mechanics of that are not got into because again, it feels more like ancient lore about magical beings and that kind of thing. Not about a magic system that is understood and has rules. So let's talk about Babel. So for anyone that wants to hear my thoughts about Babel, but without spoilers because they just don't want to read the book, I'm gonna talk about it non-spoiler now. And then after that, I will go into some spoilers because I feel that I need to to fully explain why problems with this. In my opinion, Babel is an essay in novel form. And if you're fine with that, you'll probably love it. If this were an essay, making these same points and arguments, I'd probably love it because these are points and arguments that I agree with and they are generally speaking well-made. But I require novels to be good at the novel side of things. And in my opinion, Babel almost entirely fails at that side of things. So broadly speaking, without getting into spoilery specifics, how does it fail at being a novel? First and foremost, the thing that's the biggest pain point for me as a character-driven reader is the characterization or the lack thereof. The characters in this book, if they can be called that, are predominantly vehicles through which the author then delivers arguments and observations. And she wants the reader to hear, regardless of whether it makes sense for that character to have thought that or noticed that or said that. I think the pacing of this book, it feels slow, mainly I think because I just don't feel any investment in the characters, but ultimately I would say the pacing is rushed. It just feels slow because I find it boring. But it's actually quite rushed. It feels like it is rushing to get to the conclusion of the argument of this essay. The world building is pretty much non-existent. This reads like historical fiction with the silver magic and an institute called Babel just shoved in there, but then everything else around that remains exactly the same as historical fiction would be. This is another huge pain point for me specifically, being the reader that I am. I have huge problems with this in many books. Again, Babel's not alone. Babel's not the only book that I'm mad at for doing this. There are lots of books that I have vocally criticized. Even one set in entirely separate, speculative, invented world. So it's not even set in our real world. I've often criticized books for not actually thinking through the ramifications and consequences of elements that they've introduced into their world, into their story, particularly magical elements. How they would change everything. There's a butterfly effect to introducing a world-altering element, especially like magic. If you introduce this to your world, then in my opinion, you need to think through how this would affect everything. This would affect the economy, the culture, the religion. This would affect day-to-day habits. This would affect manners and customs and social structure. And in the case of historical fantasy or alternate history fantasy, the introduction of something as huge as this silver magic would or should alter the course of history. But in Babel, it doesn't. Basically, anything that actually happened in history still happens the same way, but we swap in a silver magic explanation for the exact same thing happening. So according to Babel, the existence of silver magic and the Babel Institute has almost no effect on the course of history, which just impedes my suspension of disbelief. And it's also irritating to me because it's lazy that you haven't thought through how this would change the world because it absolutely would. And if you're telling me that it doesn't change and that the course of history went exactly the same way, then why should I care about silver magic at all? Because apparently it doesn't affect the world at all because the course of history would remain the same with or without it. Which leads me then to the magic system, which I will get into more specifics about in the spoilery section, in case you think it's spoilery to hear explained the actual workings of that magic system. So I'll save it for the spoiler section. But generally speaking, the magic system, I've already explained that magic words are not a thing that I buy into. You can get away with it under certain circumstances in my opinion. I've been told that I should regard this magic system as a metaphor and not focus so much on the mechanics of it. But it is Kuang who is focused on the mechanics of it. If you want your magic system to be regarded as a metaphor to be read that way, then that's how it should be written. With just enough information for people to understand the gist of what you're suggesting is happening, how this is affecting people, what people think about this, what they're doing about it. Or if Kuang spends a ton of time explaining the mechanics of this magic system, it is a huge part of the book, going into detail about how this supposedly works. She explains it and re-explains it and re-re-re-explains it. So if she's focusing so much of the word count and page count on the mechanics of this magic system, you can't expect me not to pick it apart when it makes no sense. I already used Lord of the Rings as an example, but Lord of the Rings now specifically as concerns the ring, the main kind of focal point of the story. The magic of the ring more or less is a metaphor and Tolkien doesn't spend any time explaining the mechanics of the one ring because that's not the point of the story. The ring is evil, the ring represents power, the ring represents temptation, it represents corruption. And so that's just what it is. Like the ring just is those things. We don't go into, oh well, because it's made out of this and under the right light, and if you wear it like this, and if you touch it like that, and if you inscribe it like this, and if you made another one, then it would react to it like, we don't go into all that because that's not the point of the story. The ring is a symbol and we don't go into detail about the science behind how the magic of the ring works. Whereas the silver magic of Babel, the mechanics of it are gone into in great detail and the details of it are really ridiculous in my opinion. So either you think this is a brilliant magic system and then we can argue about that, or it should not have been described in such detail if it should be read as a metaphor. But in my spoilery section, I'll go into why I believe she refused to write it vaguely because it wouldn't allow her to do very specific things that she was determined to do with this narrative. Lastly, for my non-spoiler section, is I don't think this is Dark Academia. Now there's a, I don't think there is one definition of what Dark Academia is, but I have arrived at my definition largely through my Dark Academia project. If you didn't see that and you are interested in it, I'll link down below. Basically, I picked up a bunch of books that I saw listed as Dark Academia and I love the secret history. So I've been on the hunt for a book that would do something equivalent to be just as good as, could keep company with the secret history. So I was trying to find another book that could. And for the most part, they all failed, but in doing this, I realized what I think my definition of Dark Academia is. One of the biggest things to me is that Dark Academia is not a dark book that has academia in it. It is not a book about academia that also has some darkness in it. No, to me, Dark Academia means that dark is the adjective describing the academia. And this does not mean, again, to me, that it just means that you murdered your school chum, but it had nothing to do with your academic studies. It just so happens that you murdered someone and the someone that you murdered was your roommate in college. So it's academia. No, the darkness may lead to murder, but the darkness should come from and be the result of the academia. So in Donna Tart's Secret History, her students in that book were obsessed to the point of murder about Greek classics and the study of Greek classics and the living out of the principles of Greek classics. In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, she wrote about a man who's obsessed with animating dead flesh. So it's sort of the science counterpoint to the classic students in the Secret History. This is Dark Academia. It is an obsession with the thing you are studying and that obsession by its very nature is dark because it's not good to be obsessed with something. It leads to extreme behavior. Babel, by contrast, whether it's good or not aside, it's about socioeconomic revolution, which happens to be told from the perspective of students at an academic institution. That school is, in many ways, at the center of colonialism and that's what the book is focused on. Colonialism, not on the darkness of pursuing academia. Dark academia, Timmy, also should mean that it is intensely character-driven. How could it not be? It is about a character or a group of characters so deep in their studies, so obsessed with their studies that this has dark consequences. So that is, by necessity, an introspective and character-driven story. But Babel is not character-driven. In my opinion, the character-working Babel is pretty abysmal. So to conclude the non-spoilers section, if you don't care about world-building, if you don't define dark academia the way that I do, if you don't care about a magic system making sense, if you don't care about good characterization, you might very well love Babel. And if you do care about those things, you might also love Babel and we can disagree about whether or not it fails in any of these categories. So moving on then to spoilers. Since I've spent so much time alluding to it, let's talk about the magic system first. For anyone that has not read it or that did read it and was understandably confused, as far as I can gather from my reading of Babel and from discussing Babel with other people who also read it, the magic system works something like this. Magic is accomplished through silver, not magical silver, just regular old silver. It is accomplished through translation. So a word in one language is inscribed on one side of a silver bar and the translation of that word into a different language is inscribed on the other side of that bar. It is accomplished through things being lost in translation. So when this word pair is inscribed on either side of this bar, something is missing in that translation. Some element of this word, some secondary or implicit meaning or implication of the one word that is absent in the translated form of that word into different language. Magic is only possible through the common understanding of words by which I mean you cannot just invent a language, you cannot use a dead language. It has to be words that are commonly used by people in these ways to mean these things but it can only be accomplished by a scholar who deeply understands the history and etymology of the words that they are native speakers of and do commonly use. So when a bar is activated, the scholar that is doing the activating, they have to have both a native understanding of these words, i.e. they dream in these languages. They also have to have an etymological historical understanding of all of the nuances and layers of meaning in those words so that when they speak this word paralleled, the thing that is lost in translation will become activated by the silver. And lastly, a belief it is accomplished through proximity, although that is unclear. It does not appear in the book that silver needs to be touching the thing that it is affecting and later on it seems that silver does not necessarily even need to be near the thing that it is affecting. How do you direct the power of the silver at or towards the thing that you intend to affect? I couldn't tell you. So my problems with this magic system are many fold, some of which are to do with the mechanics of it and some of which are to do with the thematic implications of it. For the silver magic system to work, the way that I understand that it does, silver itself, the metal, it has to understand human languages, understand the nuances of human languages. It has to understand what is the current common usage of those words by people right now. It not only understands the spoken word but also the written word because it functions only when both are combined. The writing has to be etched onto it so it has to understand the written word that is etched onto it but it has to be spoken aloud so it has to hear the word that it is etched upon it. So I don't know why silver needs this or how silver could need this or how silver could possibly scientifically understand all of this but it does, which I think is ridiculous. But not only does it understand all of these languages and understand both written and spoken word, it also has the power to influence the natural world in basically infinite ways because whatever it is that is lost in translation will materially become manifest by the silver. So it has the power to affect mood, it has the power to affect nature, it has the power to affect physics, it has the power to affect the weight and mass of something, the speed of it, it can cause explosions, it can do an infinite number of things simply because it understands human speech and written word. Silver does all of that. So how is the silver magic applied in the context of the novel? Well, people have to study in-depth histories and etymologies of the words so that they can come up with these match pairs that have a key thing missing that is lost in translation, something that would be useful and actionable, but the magic only works if these languages are in common usage in the present day. So why wouldn't anybody who speaks these languages be able to just do the magic? Why would etymology be important if this is how it works? Well, because Kuang wants to tell you about the history of words. So that's how it works. But so then why include the rule about it needing to be in common usage with these meanings? Well, because if she didn't have that rule, then someone could say, why didn't they just make up a language? Why didn't they use Vulcan? Why didn't they use Dothraki? Why don't they just make something up and then you could have infinite match pairs? No, no, we have to use real languages. Why do we have to use real languages? Because they have to be in common current usage in these forms. So then why do we study etymology? Well, because I want to tell you all about these neat little nuggets of fun information about etymological history of words. But these rules are incompatible here magic system. So why have a magic system that has incompatible rules? RFKwan couldn't think of a magic system that was based on etymology that wasn't easily then broken by the why don't you just make up a language? Okay, but so then why do the words need to be inscribed in silver of all things? Like, what is up with that? Well, my understanding of this because it does not make any sense otherwise. So this explanation is the only reason I can think of that actually sounds legit as to why this is the case. Well, it's because historically speaking, silver was important. There was historical significance to the trade of silver during the colonial British empire. So silver was chosen not because it would make for a great foundation for a magic system, but because RFKwan wanted to make a point about the history of colonialism, about greed and exploitation. Now, there was a way to make this work, I think. You couldn't make a magic system that is based on silver being a requirement and thereby play off of the already existing and history importance of silver in trade. But then that's not really compatible with this other thing you're doing of translation. And she was determined to make it do both. And she's unwilling to give up either part of the magic system. You could have a magic system about translation, but I don't know why you need silver for it. You could have a magic system that's based on silver, but then I don't know how translation would factor into that. And she could have come up with two different things going on simultaneously in this world that might in some way be connected to each other, but are ultimately different things. Whereas silver is somehow important to magic and colonialism and translation is also important to magic and colonialism. But while connected, they are separate things. You could do something like that, probably pretty effectively. But she was determined to have silver by itself be the linchpin of all of it, whether that makes sense or doesn't. Those are my problems with the mechanics of how the silver magic works, which is nonsense. I'm sorry, but it's nonsense. But I have an even bigger problem with this magic system on a thematic level. This book is ostensibly about the power of the language, about the nuance of a language, about how translation in itself is more art than science, how you could never perfectly translate something from one language into another, that what a translator does is interpret and whatever they translate is ultimately a product of their interpretation of the meaning of the thing they have translated. Frankly, I found that quite vindicating, that element of the themes of this book because I've been in hot water because I dared to suggest that I don't feel like I've truly read the works of authors if I have not read the original words they wrote, that I'm reading the translation's interpretation of them. And so if I say that I love or hate that book, I ultimately don't feel like I truly know if I love or hate that book because I might just love or hate the translator's interpretation of it. And I will never really know unless I learn the actual language and read it for myself. This book driving home the point that, yeah, there is no one-to-one translation. You can do your best guess or your best attempt at kind of trying to get the same meaning over or the same type of thing over so that it would be understandable, but it will never be a one-to-one. I completely agree with that. Like I said, I agree with a lot of points of this book. But this is where the magic system completely bucks against the very theme of this book because for a book, it's about the infinite nuance and changing nature of language, about the way that language changes depending on who speaks it, where they speak at the context of it, how it gets shaped and changed by culture, by meeting with other languages, about how languages then fracture off into being different languages when they encounter neighboring languages and a whole new language is formed from that, how all of this nuance and gray area and mess, essentially, that is language, which I do think is fascinating and that is absolutely true about language and that is one of the most fascinating things about studying language. But in this book, the magic system foils language down to a hard science with this nonsense of silver. Silver in this universe is the arbiter of the precise and exact meanings of words, whether they be in one language or a different language, and with that precision narrows down the exact thing that is lost in translation and then physically manifests that thing. There is no debate to be had about what is the actual meaning of these words, what other nuances there are to these words, how different people interpret these words in different ways. No silver decides. Silver knows what this word means, silver knows what this word means. It knows all of the ways people have ever mean it and how they currently mean it and silver decides the thing that is missing is this and therefore I explode. This silver magic is the antithesis of linguistic nuance. Moving on then to characterization or again the lack thereof as well as the plot. I kind of combine those two because I feel like they do go hand in hand because better characterization would have necessitated the plot to go slightly differently. As I said, the characters function as author inserts, just vehicles to deliver arguments and observations that it makes no sense for them to be espousing, makes no sense for them to be thinking or speaking or observing these things, but Kwong wants to make these points so they're gonna say it. Our main character, Robin, is plucked from a very, very young age from his home and his life in Canton by a British professor. Robin's mother is dead, he has no one else in the world so this British professor adopts him as his ward. You learn later that this is actually Robin's biological father, but regardless he shows up, Robin's mom is dead and he takes him away back to England where he raises them thereafter. He gives him food and clothing, a good education. He gives them every privilege that in material things that this professor would be able to give Robin. And in so doing Robin is immersed from a very young age in British culture, in British society, he's surrounded by British ideas, by Englishman espousing, pro-British, pro-colonial ideas all around him all the time in how they talk to each other and how they talk to him. But because RF Kwong fears that you're not gonna recognize racism when it's happening unless she tells you that that's what's happening, Robin at all times is fully aware of when racism has happened around him or to him. Not only is he fully aware of this going on around him, but he articulates it in fully formed notions about the structures and reasons for why people are behaving the way around him that they are. Now, is it possible that a young man who's fully immersed in colonial ways of thinking fully surrounded by white British people who fully believe in the rightness of what the Brits are doing, that a young man who has given every material advantage by this world, is it possible that this young man would retain a complete and independent understanding of the sociopolitical powers at play and how those influence his interactions with the people around him? I mean, I suppose, I suppose that is possible. Is it likely? I don't think so. Robin remains proud and indignant about the way that he is regarded and the way that he is treated. And then he finds like-minded friends at Babel who are also people of color who have been othered by British society. And they all also fully recognize what has been happening and continues to happen to them. They also fully articulate all the ways they've been affected by colonial racism and speak of it in extremely modern, on-the-nose, soap-boxing terms. Even nowadays, when we do more openly discuss these things and talk about these things and books have been published about these things, people nowadays often do not recognize the ways in which various power structures built on racism, sexism, classicism, how these have affected people and how they have overlapped and how people have experienced life. Even nowadays, people internalize the kind of racism and sexism and classicism that they are surrounded by their entire lives having been immersed in it. People nowadays have to work very hard to deconstruct all of the internalized biases that they've developed over a lifetime. And plenty of people don't bother deconstructing it. They accept these biases as simply the way the world is because that is how the world has always been to them and that is how they understand it. It is accepted as given. Ideas of superiority founded on racism, classicism, and unsexism are accepted as the way the world is. I find it extremely unlikely that a young boy who is raised by a British scholar from a very young age, given every material privilege, does not know any other way, does not have anyone else around him to guide his thinking, that this young boy would not drink the Kool-Aid more. And I think this novel would be a lot better if he had. When Robin reaches Oxford, he's not confronted by worldviews that conflict with his own, that force him to question and interrogate his own assumptions and biases, that force him to question his abiding allegiance to a country and culture that he's lived in since he was a child. No, he meets with people that already pretty much think the way that he does. And he's like, oh, awesome. I'm not the only one that's conscious of being othered my whole life. Cool. Wouldn't it be far more interesting if Robin, upon meeting Rami and the other Babel students was met with a variety of sentiments about Britain, some that love the empire that they've been living in and benefiting from their entire lives, some who came into it later and harbor a great deal of resentment like Rami? Wouldn't it make for more dynamic debates and more introspection if Robin initially defended, staunchly defended Britain and the empire that he benefited from? After all, the professor and the empire rescued him from poverty, educated him, gave him clothing and food and a great deal of material comfort. If he then gradually, when confronted with these troubling ideas, he gradually came to realize that maybe, just maybe the system that he so greatly benefited from might actually be quite insidious. What if Robin retained his faith in Britain and the empire right up until he actually returned to Canton and was confronted fully with the horrors that have been inflicted on his homeland by the empire? What if Robin's ardent faith in the empire was turned to ardent hatred once he realized what he had been turning a blind eye to? Now that's someone that would be ripe for radicalization. What if Robin had been determined to love the cold man that had raised him but seeing the state of Canton and fully realizing what he's been party to, being around the Babel students who have begun the process of changing his mind? If that's what opened his eyes to the actual cruelty of the man that raised him and that made him snap. But no, Robin is fully aware of racism and colonialism the whole time, confirms his friends largely agree with that and his female cohorts add in some soap boxing about extremely modern day understandings of feminism and patriarchy, all of which is shoehorned in on the nose and sounds completely out of place, especially because again, even today, women often internalize patriarchal ideas that they've been surrounded by their entire lives and you're telling me that these girls who got into Oxford in a time when that is not at all common for women to do, that they would not have internalized some of that patriarchal thinking, at least some of them. You're telling me that they would have fully formed ideas about how patriarchy functions, how it affects them and would they be going around lambasting patriarchy to young men that they have just met at Oxford? Robin is radicalized practically the instant that he arrives at Oxford. It doesn't take a gradual shifting of understanding and perception and questioning what he has believed his whole life. Nope, he shows up and is pretty much instantly on board with joining a terrorist group. Going to Canton later doesn't open his eyes so much as it just confirms what he already knew and shows him how actually really bad things are. Cause I mean he knew they were bad but he didn't know how bad. Robin is aware from day one and thinking about how cold his father is. There is no internal or external revelation about this. So when he kills his father in a moment of anger this is not a big turning point for his character or a moment of growth or shift in Robin as a character. No, it's just an escalation of their situation because now, oh no, what are we gonna do with the dead body? Not what does this mean for Robin and his understanding of who he is in his place in the world, what his life has been up to that point. And if you thought Robin was radicalized quickly wait until he gives one speech to the students of Babel and they are instant radicalized all completely on board now with this occupation of the Babel Tower. One speech from Robin and it's down with Babel, down with Oxford, down with the empire, down with Britain. I mean, wow, that's all it took. Who knew Robin was such a great orator. Silver magic then makes even less sense during the siege of Babel where apparently there are these support bars in Babel that support the network of silver that is supporting all of Oxford. How this silver knows to affect something that is not near it or directly touching it, I couldn't tell you. Robin starts willy-nilly pulling out these silver bars to damage the structural integrity of the rest of Oxford. Again, I don't know how that silver from a distance is supporting the structural integrity of Oxford. But moreover, if that is the case who's to say Robin's not going to accidentally pull out a silver bar. I don't know what it's touching that he's pulling it out of but it is making it function or whatever. Who's to say he's not pulling out a bar that's supporting the structural integrity of Babel itself and sabotaging himself. Like, what an idiot. But that's not suggested anywhere in the book like, hey, what are you doing? You could hurt Babel. It's just like, oh yeah, chaos, let's do it. Yeah. And lastly, of course, the one white friend they have turns on them and is evil. So is that a surprising twist that she's evil? No. Is it a big shocking revelation that she's turned on them? No. Is it an unforeseen betrayal that results in a gasp? No, because, well, she's white, therefore she's evil. So, you know, we expected it. And then we come to the footnotes. Despite sacrificing everything in this novel for the sake of the arguments and points that she wants to make, she still couldn't manage to cram in every bit of research and every bit of discussion of colonialism and imperialism and British being evilness into the main narrative. So we added footnotes. And I mean, Susanna Clark did it. Therefore, it's brilliant, right? But ultimately the footnotes mostly serve as a crutch because Robin is a pretty limited perspective even though he's been made to think and observe things that it doesn't really make sense for him to have observed or thought. Even with all that, he's still not able to provide you all of the information that R.F. Kwong wants you to have. So the footnotes serve to tell us whatever it is that Robin just absolutely could not possibly know or be able to tell you and things that Kwong feels that we absolutely must know. The most egregious example of this is later on in the book when Robin's brother Griffin is having this violent altercation with somebody that Griffin knew from his past. This is not something that Robin is intensely aware of the history and nuance of the relationship between these two individuals. He couldn't know that, he wasn't there for it, no one told him about this. So we have a footnote telling us exactly what Griffin's relationship with this person was and why this moment is so significant for his character and what it really means to him. Footnotes are not for character development and significant character revelations. So the fact that this is a footnote, just, you know what? It's something that we're just not gonna know as readers, okay? My camera went out of battery. But yeah, basically find a way for Robin to know it or don't include it in your narrative because that's a footnote is not where that goes. So in conclusion, Babel is just so much wasted potential. The themes of colonialism I do think suit dark academia very well. Discussion of translation suits dark academia very well. Students of color trying to excel at a British institution at the height of colonialism would suit dark academia very well. Introducing magic into dark academia, into colonialism, into translation. It's a great idea. So why didn't this work? Well, I think it's because Kwong is not interested in writing a novel. She's interested in making points, proposing arguments and discussing and debating these issues and in showing off everything that she personally knows about etymology. The character's thoughts and observations, they only ever serve to make the points that she wants to make. The magic system only ever serves to make the points that she is trying to make. The events of the novel only ever serve to make the points that she is trying to make. And this hurts so much. Why does it hurt so much? Because the points that she is making are points that I agree with. I would love to see a good novel explore these themes in a compelling way. In my opinion, what makes a strong novel is very different from what makes a strong essay. Well, an essay should very clearly make its arguments to you, very clearly define its thesis and then provide points in support of that thesis and then tell you its conclusion. That is not what a novel should do. A novel should be a story that grips you. It should be about characters that you find compelling, a plot that you're invested in, a world that feels cohesive and believably real. And in reading that novel, you alongside these ideally compelling characters may be confronted with troubling ideas, may be forced to grapple with the dark truths. And those themes and ideas will land and hit home with your reader so much more if they are invested in the characters and in the world and in the story. They will internalize these ideas without realizing they're doing it. Before when I was talking with my patrons, I used the analogy of vitamins where a good novel should be like a nutritionally complete meal where you've gotten all the vitamins and minerals you need from a very enjoyable, delicious dish. A less good novel will insert vitamin supplements into what it is feeding you, but will do a decent job of masking the flavor. You might notice it here and there, something tastes a little bit off about it, but mostly just tastes like good food where you can kind of tell there's some vitamins in there. A bad book will be like vitamin tablets that you are trying to swallow by eating or drinking something tasty alongside it. In my opinion, soap boxing in a novel is never a good idea. It does not matter if I agree with those points. In fact, it will bother me more probably if I do agree with those points because I'll think, ugh, you're doing these points such a disservice by handling them in such a way that's bound to just upset and anger and irritate people rather than making them in a compelling way where people might actually absorb these ideas and actually internalize them. If the author wants to address the reader directly, well, then they should write nonfiction or write an afterword, but a novel is not the place for that. The fact that she dared to put herself at a level with Susanna Clark and Donna Tart to masters of their craft who each spent about 10 years on their respective novels. Babel felt like a rushed, rough draft of something that could turn into a compelling idea one day. With a lot of time and effort, it could be shaped into something truly special. Instead, we got an essay about the evils of colonialism masquerading as a novel with a completely nonsensical magic system, zero creativity in the world building and cardboard cutout characters. Donna Tart is a master of character work. Clark is a master of sprawling historical fantasy, blending the real with the invented, not to mention clever use of footnotes. Babel fails at all of these things. So reading this book, I'm left feeling like how dare you call this book a response implying the works of Donna Tart and Susanna Clark were in some way inferior and will now be shown how it's done by Babel. I mean, what a joke. So if you love Babel, I am sincerely 100% delighted for you because loving a book is great. I love loving books. That's why I get so mad when I don't because I go into every book hoping slash expecting to love it. And when it fails me, I find it upsetting. Seeing the squandered potential of Babel in particular really, really upset me because these ideas, these themes, this type of book, it should be my favorite book of the year. And it really hurts that I think it's so badly written. But again, if you love it, nothing I say can change that. If you enjoyed your experience with Babel, nothing I say can change that. If you think it is brilliant that it was great character work, the magic system is sublime that these themes were handled with all the new ones that you desire. Again, nothing I say can change that. This is my review. This is my opinion. This is my experience reading Babel and that is all I'm here to share with you. Let me know in the comments down below your thoughts and feelings about Babel. If you've read it, if you haven't read it, if you plan to read it, if you never plan to read it, whatever you wanna let me know. 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