Babel by R.F. Kuang

Rating: 2/5 stars

There are spoilers in this review.

My gay brother in Islam is dead and R.F. Kuang killed him.

Babel by R.F. Kuang follows Robin, a half Chinese half English boy who is taken from Canton to England in a version of the 1830s where the British Empire has gained its power with the help of magic silver-work. Robin is given a “proper English education” and enrolls in Oxford to pursue translation at the fictitious Babel. While there, he meets three others in his cohort: Ramy, Victoire, and Letty. The book follows cohort through their time at Babel, as they face questions of language, translation, imperialism, and rebellion.

I could write a thesis on all my thoughts about this book, but for this review I’m going to stick to the points that bothered me the most: the themes, the fate of Ramiz Rafi Mirza, and the ending.

EMPIRE IS BAD BECAUSE IT IS BAD BUT YOU ALSO WANT TO BE A PART OF IT BECAUSE IT’LL MAKE YOU WHITE AND THAT’S BAD BUT ALSO YOU WANT IT

In an interview with The Orange County Register about Babel, R.F. Kuang said:

“…even after you become disillusioned with the elite circle, there’s still this tension—you still want to belong…even if you can never quite get fully on the inside, isn’t it so seductive, just to be close with and approximate whiteness? I think the temptation is real, and it’s something that I think about constantly, and it was very troubling to me when I was at Cambridge and Oxford.”

Setting aside my astonishment at this statement (I have never in my life wanted to “be close with and approximate whiteness”), it’s hilarious that R.F. Kuang came out and said this so directly, because it’s a huge point of contradiction within Babel. Robin is half English, sometimes can pass as white, uses an English name (we never learn his Chinese name, which was given to him by his mother—nor, for that matter, do we ever learn his mother’s name), and is attending Oxford so that he can become a translator.

Robin is disgusted with what white people within the Empire are doing, but the privileges of whiteness and Oxford are so nice (scones seem to be a big draw for him…maybe it’s the Indian in me speaking, but if you’re going to choose a pastry to ignore imperialism for, at least pick something better than a scone) that he can’t fully bring himself to commit to acting against the Empire.

“…he wondered at the contradiction: that he despised them, that he knew they could be up to no good, and that he still wanted to be respected by them enough to be included in their ranks.”

This could have been a fine enough theme, though it is one that has already been talked about to death by tons of authors in the past. The problem is that this theme is never explored in a nuanced way. Everything is TOLD to you, either in narration or dialogue or the approximately seven hundred and eighty-four footnotes, in a way that is very precious and pleased with itself for being clever. There are paragraphs of text lecturing why empire is bad, how language and translation are tools of empire, how white people treat people of color, and so on. For example, when the senior porter says “Univ has always had a special link to the colonies,” the footnote says “This was true. University College had produced, among others, a Chief Justice of Bengal (Sir Robert Chambers), a Chief Justice of Bombay (Sir Edward West), and a Chief Justice of Calcutta (Sir William Jones). All were white men.”

Why over-explain the fact that all are white men? They have English names and attended Oxford in the 18th and early 19th centuries; OBVIOUSLY they are white men. This kind of over-explaining is rampant through the text; it condescends to the reader and assumes that we cannot be trusted to figure anything out for ourselves unless we are beaten over the head with it.

This kind of over-explaining of your themes also leaves no room for other interpretations. When Professor Playfair says that “an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal”—a line used often in the marketing for this book—Robin feels “a deep, vinegary squirm of guilt in his gut,” a reaction that I assume means we are supposed to take Playfair’s statement as truth. But isn’t this statement a hilarious oversimplification? Could an act of translation not also be an act of love? When I watch a Hindi movie with my friends and I explain a word or phrase in more detail than what the subtitle says, am I betraying my people? Or am I doing this out of affection for my friends and a desire to bring them into my circle, to help them understand a little more about me and where I am from?

If at any point Robin and his cohort had shared their languages with each other, then this could have been a fair interpretation. The reader could see the way Oxford and England use translation as a tool of empire, then see Robin and his cohort sharing Mandarin, Urdu, Cantonese, Kreyòl, Arabic, etc. as a way to strengthen their friendship and learn about each other’s cultures. The reader then decides for THEMSELF what they think of translation and how it is used, rather than being TOLD that it is always an act of betrayal. But Robin and his cohort only study together for languages like Latin and never teach each other phrases in their home languages at all—in fact, the only time that the cohort learns any Chinese is when they are going to Canton with Oxford professors…as tools of the Empire.

Canton brings me to the other issue with the theme: class. For all the book’s over-direct discussion of equality, Robin never meaningfully interacts with the working class. A Chinese man is working the fan when Robin and his cohort are dining with European businessmen in Canton; does Robin acknowledge him at all? No, he “felt an odd pang of guilt every time he met the servant’s eyes” but does not speak to him. There is Mrs. Piper, the housekeeper in Professor Lovell’s home, but she is a maternal figure and nothing more. A scout cleans Robin’s room at Oxford; does he ever speak to him, leave a tip, leave a note saying thank you? No. In Book V, Robin comes to realize that the British working class are allies, but it is only after receiving help from them during the students’ occupation of the tower, not because he, you know, sees the working class as human beings worthy of dignity.

In contrast to Robin, however, you have Ramy. Ramy is Indian, cannot pass as white, has an Indian Muslim name, and (we learn later) from the beginning is fully aware of the atrocities of the Empire and wishes to work against it. He never tries to fit in, because it isn’t possible for him. Sometimes through jokes and sometimes through arguments, he always asserts his own identity and challenges anyone who says that the Empire is beneficial or harmless. He tries to cook Indian food for his friends. His father is a servant in a British man’s house in India, so he must understand the effects of class.

You would think that Ramy is the model, the character who will serve as what the other characters ought to be, as a person who is proud of himself and his origins. You would think so, except he is shot dead by Letty at roughly the 75% mark.

MY GAY BROTHER IN ISLAM IS DEAD AND R.F. KUANG KILLED HIM

For most of my reading experience, I was prepared to give Babel 2.5 stars. One star for its writing quality, which, while not distinctive, was at least solid on a technical level; one star for the potential that the book has, though it sadly did not live up to it; and half a star for the brief moments, characters, details, and dialogues that I did somewhat enjoy.

Then I got to Ramy’s death.

Surely this is a fake out, I thought, naïvely, like some kind of naïve person. It’s only 75% into the book. He’s really alive and there will be a fun and touching reunion scene later.

It is not a fake out.

Surely this will have a point, I thought, desperately, like some kind of desperate person. You wouldn’t kill off a character for no reason. You wouldn’t kill off a MUSLIM character, an INDIAN character, a GAY character, for NO REASON. That would be INSANE. That would be so stupidly horrible as to be HILARIOUS.

Spoiler alert: Ramy’s death has no point. R.F. Kuang sat there and typed out his death with her own two hands and not once did she stop to consider the implications of being Chinese and writing the death of her Muslim main character. She is not responsible for what China is doing to Muslims. I am not saying that at all. But you would perhaps think twice about writing your Muslim character’s death—a death at the hands of Letty, a white English woman, who betrays the cohort because she chooses to side with the British—when you come from a culture that is actively participating in violence against Muslims and when you have heavily marketed your book with this character.

Then there is the added bonus of Ramy and Robin being a romantic pairing. I do not know R.F. Kuang’s sexuality, but she is engaged to a man, which is an enormous privilege (I just realized how darkly funny it is that R.F. Kuang is engaged to a man while writing the deaths of two men who, if they had even lived through the story, could never have been legally married to each other). Robin and Ramy’s feelings for each other are clear through the book, but their romantic relationship never manifests while Ramy is alive; in fact, the first time that the word ‘love’ is used to describe Robin’s feelings for Ramy is AFTER his death:

“…a complicated tangle of love and jealousy that ensnared them all…” (right after his death)

“[Letty] loved [Ramy] almost like Robin loved him…” (when Robin is trying to convince himself that Ramy isn’t actually dead, because Letty wouldn’t kill someone whom she loved)

“The air that day smelled like a promise, all of Oxford shone like an illumination, and [Robin] was falling in love.” (Robin’s memory of his first morning at Oxford with Ramy. This is second-to-last thought—other than his final thought of his mother—as he is destroying Babel and dying in the process)

So we have a white English woman who shoots a gay Indian Muslim man to death, because he does not reciprocate her feelings, because he is in love with a gay Chinese man, who loves him back—but we do not even get any confirmation of this until after Ramy is dead, and this event fills Robin with such rage and grief and pain that he constantly thinks of death:

“…thought of death as a reprive. He had not stopped dreaming of it since the day Letty shot Ramy….[thought of] paradise, of green hills and brilliant skies where he and Ramy could sit and talk and watch an eternal sunset….[even if death is nothingness] everything would just stop: the pain, the anguish, the awful, suffocating grief.”

And that brings us to the ending.

KILLING OFF THE PEOPLE OF COLOR TO GET THE WHITE PEOPLE’S SYMPATHY ISN’T NOBLE AND ROMANTIC, EXCEPT IT IS, EXCEPT I’M SAYING IT’S NOT, SO IT ISN’T EVEN THOUGH I’M DOING IT

The ending is dumb as hell. There’s no other way to say it. Robin has been thinking of death since Canton, when he says to Ramy that “it doesn’t feel like we have the right to be alive” because of all the privileges they have received from the Empire. After Ramy’s death, Robin can’t imagine a future at all; he just wants to bring down as much as possible before he dies.

One of the many subheadings is “the necessity of violence.” We are, as with every theme in this book, TOLD that Robin now believes in violence, rather than being shown it in increments throughout the narrative (there were mentions of violence as a method of anti-colonialism, but always in lectures within dialogue or narration, and rarely shown to us in action). Robin decides to take over the tower, then, when the occupation does not bring the results that he and the other protestors are hoping for, decides to destroy Babel by invoking “translate” with the magic silver-work (which, by the way, was some very poor and very silly worldbuilding, but this review is too long already).

Victoire and one other student say their goodbyes and escape; the other three students and a professor remain to die with Robin while destroying the tower. Victoire is adamantly against this kind of violent sacrifice:

“We have to die to get their pity. We have to die for them to find us noble.”

Who is this statement for? Who is this book for, for that matter? You can’t say:

“In theory, this decision they’d made was something beautiful. In theory, they would be martyrs, heroes, the ones who’d pushed history off its path.…In the moment, all that mattered was that death was painful and frightening and permanent…”

and think that covers for your ending. Stating that this ending is not beautiful or a way to get pity is pointless when that’s exactly what the ending is. With this kind of ending, how is this book not exactly what it claims to NOT be: a way for the white reader to see the characters of color like Ramy or Griffin getting shot to death, then see the ones like Robin and Meghana and Ibrahim die taking down the tower, then see someone like Letty face no consequences, and think “oh, how terrible that the white murderer got away, while the characters of color suffer, and even the ones who escaped have no certain future and can only HOPE, oh how powerful it is to HOPE even when your friend SELFISHLY CHOSE DEATH”?

How is that not exactly the romantic, noble ending that is criticized within the text only pages before? You shoot to death your only main character who was vocally anti-Empire and you kill off your main character who thinks he has no right to live. How is this book not playing into the concept that when it comes to Empire, and colonization, and being a brown face in a world where white people hold power, your options are compliance, or death, or a very narrow escape after a life of suffering, with only the barest hope of a future ahead of you? What sort of message does this send in a book that claims to be anti-Empire?

IF YOU READ BABEL AS A GAY MUSLIM INDIAN YOU MAY BE ENTITLED TO FINANCIAL COMPENSATION

Which brings me to my concluding thought: Why the hell does no one else seem to be critical of this? Are people so convinced of Kuang’s prowess as writer and intelligence as an academic that they think they've got to agree with her and aren't qualified to criticize? Have people have bought so much into the hype about Kuang as an author and Babel as a book that they cannot see the book for what it truly is?

Or have people have sunk so much time, money, and effort into preordering eighteen special editions, buying tickets for her book tour, and giving her free marketing across twitter and tiktok, that they cannot bear to realize the embarrassing truth: that Babel is not the remarkable tour de force that they hoped it would be, but in fact an overly precious, half-baked, clunky attempt at explaining imperialism, with a dead gay Indian Muslim for some added spice?

I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s a mix, maybe it’s something else that I haven’t considered. If anyone figures it out, don’t bother telling me. I’ll be too busy reading Ponniyin Selvan in an effort to recover from this experience.