![]() People and events glanced obliquely in the background tend to be historically accurate, creating an effect similar to the historical novel. In preparation for Babel, Lovell subjects Robin to an excruciating regime of language study, with training in Latin and Greek as well as Chinese. The professor, however, already has a destiny in mind for the boy: to study at Oxford University’s Royal Institute of Translation (nicknamed Babel, suitably housed in a tower) where he is himself working on the Chinese language. The fact that Robin needs to pick his own name - adopting his last name from the author of Gulliver’s Travels - sets the stage for questions of identity and belonging. ![]() These elements are blended together by Kuang’s writerly alchemy into a captivating whole.īabel is mostly told from the perspective of Robin Swift, a Chinese-born boy brought to England by the eerie Professor Lovell after Robin’s mother dies in a cholera epidemic. ![]() Even more ambitious is the novel’s literary play, which subverts the campus novel. The fantastic is used to demythologize the imperial past, with a magic system inspired by postcolonial thought. Set in an altered 1830s Britain, the novel speaks to the historical imagination. KUANG’s latest novel Babel, or The Necessity of Violence : An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution (Harper Voyager, 2022) gives readers not just a thrilling work of fantasy, but also an adventure of the mind. ![]()
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