"Babel" by R. F. Kuang

Imagine that I decided to write a novel set in, for example, nineteenth century Imperial China. The heroes of my story are all people who are not Chinese but who come from the various countries whose leaders paid tribute to the Emperor, being required to kowtow in a display of submission etc. However, these heroes are very contemporary twenty-first century youths with woke sensibilities who I parachute into Imperial China and who bear no resemblance at all to anyone who might actually have been living there at the time. Then, not content with writing about the various abuses of power, corruption and unspeakably cruel punishments that officials of the regime meted out, I invent all kinds of alternative technologies which are deployed in my narrative to make the reader hate the Chinese regime even more and to justify the use of extensive violence aimed at bringing it down. Not content with describing the process by which eunuchs were castrated, dozens of concubines made available for the emperor to please himself with, or public executions carried out using the ‘death by a thousand cuts’ method, I soup the atrocities up further and claim that such forms of autocratic government were in some way uniquely Chinese inventions. I then make all my Chinese characters hateful, cruel, James Bond-style villains who are motivated only by self-interest and a sense of racial superiority. They lack all humanity. They deploy violence, but are simultaneously cowards. By contrast everyone who is not Chinese in my novel is a very contemporary enlightened liberal type.

This is what Kuang does in her book. But her villains are all British people, and as she makes abundantly clear throughout, hers' are exclusively white villains. These people are portrayed in her fantasy world – with all the subtlety of Mein Kampf - as being universally and irredeemably vile. She seems to have developed a particular dislike of Balliol College whose undergraduates are all portrayed as nasty, racist, posh nincompoops. Here is one of a number of passages that seemed to me to be pretty unashamedly racist:

‘For God’s sake’, snapped Professor Playfair. ‘Someone apprehend them.’ A handful of graduate fellows stepped forward, looking uncertain. All Europeanists, all white. Robin cocked his head. ‘Well come on.’ What happened next was not dignified, would never be shelved next to great epics of valour and bravery. For Oxford’s scholars were sheltered and coddled, armchair theorists who wrote of blood-stained battlefields with smooth and delicate hands….. Robin kicked them away. And it felt like kicking at children, for they were too fearful to be vicious, and they weren’t nearly desperate or angry enough to really hurt him.

Just replace the word ‘white’ with that of another racial group and you will see why it is so offensive.

As was the case for all empires throughout history – very much including the Chinese one which is portrayed here as a well-meaning, but helpless victim - abuses and crimes took place. There were many more than enough of them to fuel the narrative of a novel such as this one. So why create further ahistorical, fantasy atrocities unless your aim is to whip up a degree of racial (in this case anti-British) hatred? In this respect I found the book to be pretty offensive in all honesty. It would be entirely possible to write a first rate novel in which people act to prevent the outbreak of the First Opium War without lacing the narrative with racial stereotypes and pretty overt authorial racism.

Oxford University, in Kuang’s world, was built on the profits of slavery. And that slavery was abolished only because of slave revolts, there being not an ounce of decency or morality among any of the British educated classes. But actually slavery was never really abolished at all. What is worse is the way that the heroes of this story are portrayed as being entirely justified in carrying out what we would now term acts of mass terrorism, killing vast numbers of innocent people in order to prevent a different potential war from occurring. The book’s alternative title is ‘The Necessity of Violence’. The ethics are seriously dodgy.

But what really made it ridiculous as a work of supposed literature, was its extraordinary limitations as historical fiction. The author makes play in her introduction of having (a) carried out extensive research into nineteenth century Oxford life and (b) making slight alterations to take account of her alternative technological history which brought some events forward etc. I could see no sign whatever of any such research. Contemporary language as well as ideals suffuse in a ridiculously anachronistic manner. The terminology and world portrayed has far more in common with twenty-first century Harvard than nineteenth-century Oxford. We have people who ‘work in legal’. We have ‘janitorial staff’. We have whistleblowers ‘going public’. We have ‘post-docs’ and ‘professors’ (of whom there were very few in 1830s Oxford) ‘applying for tenure’. Moreover Oxford is positively swimming with female students and 'faculty'. It is laughable as a portrait of the university at that time. Of course it can be argued that it is a work of fantastical fiction, and none of this stuff matters. That is not true. Precisely because of the garlands awarded to a supposed work of serious literature, readers will believe it to be true.

My other problem is more personal. I just do not get along with fantasy fiction. I know it is beloved by many. But I just find it absurd. Here we have silver bars which are infused with various supernatural qualities when engraved with ‘matched pairs’ of words from different world languages. These have fuelled a ‘silver industrial revolution’ the upshot of which appears to be a desire on the part of the British for world-wide domination of all other peoples. It is the semi-magical powers of silver bars that are permitting imperial expansion. All very silly.

Babel is one of my least favourite reads in a long time. How it could ever have been nominated for any literary prize at all is completely beyond me. It is little more than an ethically questionable YA fantasy novel for the Harry Potter generation with added violent identity politics, and hence I guess, simply not intended for someone like me.