1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel. The tower and its students are the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver-working—the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars—has made the British unparalleled in power, as the arcane craft serves the Empire's quest for colonization.
For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to stopping imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide: can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence?
"There are no kind masters". R.F. Kuang's Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution is a bleak and tragic tale about racism and colonialism. It's a hard read, it doesn't mince words, and it's a tragedy in the truest sense of the word. It's also a beautiful exploration of languages and philology, and a love letter to the act of translation, which powers magic in this world. It's an alternate history that draws on very real and terrible things, like the opium trade. It deserves to be on this blog because of the unspoken and unresolved attraction between the two male main characters, but I wouldn't recommend reading it merely because of the evanescent queer content. It is a phenomenal tale, though, and one I think everyone should read.
✨ 5 stars
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