August 2025 book review

Babel, by R.F. Kuang

This review has been a long time coming! Dark academia at its strongest, the book follows Robin Swift, an orphaned boy from Canton brought by his guardian to Britain to study at Oxford's Royal Institute of Translation, the source of the nation's colonial and industrial power.

I really enjoyed this book, it's a chunk but I read it in a couple of days. It's intelligent, fast-paced, and well-researched.

As an ex-linguist, I thoroughly enjoyed the idea that translation is a betrayal of a mother tongue, and becomes a new beast heavily burdened with its own cultural heritage and the individual predispositions of the translator. It's an incredibly clever idea, and works so well because Kuang is a complete authority in the subject. She writes beautifully, and the footnotes throughout the book could have run the risk of making the book dense, but instead they're extra flavouring, sprinkled on top and interesting in their own right. They're not for everyone, but I enjoyed them. The characters are all inviduals you could imagine yourself having a pint with and engaging in night-long table-top-bashing arguments.

My own incredible greed stops me from putting five stars. I wanted to know more about the world; there's an incredible alternative system inserted into the industrial revolution, and we see empires rise and fall on it. It explores colonialism, racism, education. But - and I appreciate that there is a limit to what can be squeezed into a book, and Kuang will have made executive decisions about what to explore and what to leave to imagination - there are so many more areas where this thought experiment can be run. What effect would a system, which would appear to the civilian to be magic, have on religion? On studies in metaphysics?

Another issue I had was with the tone. Britain's colonial history is a point of cultural shame, for me at least, because even though it led to real advancements in industry it was usually on the back of another nations' suffering (and that of our own working class, but that's another rant). The book did a good job highlighting that, but there was such a tone of contempt throughout that it made it a little unpleasant to read at times. Perhaps this was The Point, a good book isn't necessarily supposed to be pure entertainment but will make you stop and think, but I think there's a way to balance criticism without risking alienating a lot of your audience by framing accusation in a way that makes the blame feel personal. But that's just my two cents.

Regardless, I loved it. It spoke to my own university experience, although sadly I never came across a leaning tower of oysters. Kuang reminded me of the long library hours, writing essays through the night and somehow still having energy to attend lectures and parties, riding exhaustion without the risk of burn out because it was fuelled by genuine interest.

Thank you to HarperVoyager for sending me a copy.

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