Babel is a good book. I’m stating this at the outset because what comes after is mostly negative. It’s not because I dislike the book, but because I see so much potential in it that could very easily have been fulfilled but was not.
The author had a very promising setting, situation, and set of characters, but she decided to forget all about them. Instead of seizing every opportunity to further the plot and develop the characters, she seizes every opportunity to hammer home the message that colonialism, racism, imperialism, white superiority, etc., is wrong. There is nothing wrong about this, but the author sacrifices the story and the characters on the altar of her message. As a result, although parts of Babel were enjoyable, I failed to find this a substantial work of literature because the author did not have her priorities clear and nearly ruined what could have been an almost flawless story (“nearly” ruined because it was partly salvaged by the ending).
Robin
On some very obvious points, Kuang seems to think that one explanation is not enough; the reader must be told, again, again, again, again, again, and yet again, in every way possible, that Colonialism Is Bad, that Colonialism is the worst form of evil in this world. But when the protagonist (Robin) kills a man, no explanation is offered. It’s as if the author wants the reader to understand Robin’s motivations immediately: a snap of the fingers, and eureka! This seems to have been the case with Robin’s friends; they apparently understood his motivations immediately, and immediately after that they’d found very good reasons for covering up the crime, and immediately after that they’d decided that there was no need to talk about why Robin committed murder. Well, our eureka is still forthcoming. We cannot think like the protagonist's friends not because we’re narrow-minded people who can’t sympathize with Robin's psychologically grim childhood or his experience of racial discrimination in 1830s Oxford, or because we’re simply not as good at inference as these Oxford-trained minds, but because the author did not built the character up in such a way that we would be ready to understand his motivations without authorial comment.
My interpretation is that Robin committed murder because the treatment he has received is just too much for him, and he was so torn between two irreconcilable set of values that things tipped over the edge. Both are good reasons. The “buildup” to the first is the understanding that in 1830s Oxford a Chinese-British young man would be discriminated against. And this was a pretty good buildup insofar as we are given a couple of examples, but there is a flaw that could easily have been avoided: most of the discriminatory episodes in the book actually involve discrimination not against Robin the protagonist but against Ramy, Victoire, or even Letty. During the Oxford episodes, mentions of Robin’s status as a Babbler (which means that he receives special treatment and special respect and special funds and have special access to special libraries and facilities) and his ability to “pass for white” appear more frequently than instances of discrimination against him. It is true, however, that if he wasn’t a Babbler, he would not have been welcome at Oxford, and he was only accepted there because even though the British despise him, they still want to use him against his homeland. This reason is, in my opinion, pretty sufficient for Robin to commit an impulsive murder, especially when (a) the murder victim is part of this oppressive system and has given him an untold amount of emotional damage, and (b) he has just seen the Chinese suffering from opium in Canton and how the British traders treated them. But there is a gap between these reasons and the reality of the book. While all the basic “ingredients” for murder are there if you do some digging, they never quite seem to add up in a realistic, coherent, and convincing way,¹ because these “ingredients” are organized and spaced in such a way that the reader’s line of thought while reading is often distracted by other, less relevant, issues, including
(a) different ways of saying “studying at Oxford is wonderful”;
(b) different ways of saying “studying at Oxford is hard”;
(c) Ramy and Letty biting each other’s heads off;
(d) forays into Robin’s mind that only skim the surface;
(e) historical and narrative elements on the evils of colonization;
(f) historical and narrative elements on the evilness of the British;
(g) an abundance of footnotes on both e and f.
All this is good and in some cases indispensable to the plot, but the book would have been better if the author had actually used most of these points to further illustrate Robin’s character, motivations, fears, desires, etc., instead of using it to say Colonialism Is Bad, because the protagonist of this book is supposed to be Robin, not Colonialism. We as readers already know that colonialism is bad, that racism is bad, that white superiority and self-interest are bad, that what the British did to its colonies and colonized is unjustifiable, but we don’t know who Robin is, and we want to.² I for one really wanted to, and I really tried to.
At the risk of oversimplifying things, I would say that when it all boils down, there are two Robins in this book: Robin before Ramy died, and Robin after Ramy died. Kuang does a good job showing us who Robin became after Ramy died (though even that could have been better if she spent more time in Robin’s mind or showed us Robin’s actions or let us listen in on Robin’s dialogues instead of dwelling, again, on e, f, and g). But we barely know who Robin is before Ramy’s death. Too often we are distracted by e, f, and g, and we spend too little time exploring Robin in depth. I would argue that Robin as a character did not even have any depth until Ramy died. There was so much potential to Robin and most of that potential, especially before Ramy’s death, turned out to be just potential and nothing more.
The book could have been much more like a human story and less like an aggravating lecture if Kuang had used some of her footnote space to develop character. Don’t get me wrong, some of her footnotes were interesting and instructive. But repetition kills enjoyment. And it kills the point because readers most likely did not pick up this book to be lectured about something that is already widely accepted as truth or could be easily inferred from the events in the book, but to see how this issue would play out in an alternative world and how the characters would deal with it in a fictional setting.³
Supporting Characters
Even though Robin becomes a full-fleshed person after Ramy’s death, Victoire Desgraves⁴ is never salvaged as a character because she never becomes more than an abstract idea of perfection. As a black Haitian woman in 1830s Oxford, her story probably had the most potential of all. But yet again, none of this potential is realized. Victoire has no dimensions or depth whatsoever. She never makes a mistake and never shows a flaw. The reader can never fathom her motivations or thoughts because nothing is ever said about them. All the way to the end, when she becomes the only person left of the friend group, we still know nothing about Victoire. I fail to understand this almost unseemly authorial neglect, unless… the author really does not care about Victoire because Victoire is merely in the story as a symbol of black womanhood, or because she has more important things to do (such as writing footnotes), or because she does not understand the potential experience of a black woman in 1830s Oxford and did not bother to find out.
Another equally disappointing character is Professor Croft. (Actually, most of the good characters in this book are disappointing because the author accompanies all the bad characters’ actions with footnotes or deprecating authorial comments but does not confer this honor on morally commendable characters.) Professor Croft makes a stunning U-turn: from the forbidding, tight-lipped, no-nonsense professor who droned out her lectures in monotone and rebuffed Letty’s questions on sexist discrimination in academia, she all of a sudden becomes the only white person on the protagonist's side, one of Robin’s staunchest supporters and the first person who volunteers to stay with him and destroy Babel. It’s almost as if she and Letty had exchanged places. But why? Did she get tired of teaching? Did she just want a bit of watered-down tea? We will never know, because in the long chapters full of repetitive descriptions of British stubborness in the face of cities crumbling from lack of silver maintenance, Kuang never found the opportunity to mention it.
Never mind introducing four new characters who immediately become the only Babblers who would join Robin and Victoire’s revolution, with no context, no buildup, no explanation, just a line of something like “they talked and talked and realized that they had so much in common because all of them had been discriminated against in similar ways”. Why not show us what they talked about? Needless to say, the revolution is a very important part of the story (in fact, it’s the reason the story exists, because the book purports to be a history of the revolution), but the players in this revolution are random people pulled from Babel according to a random list. We’ve got an Arab, check. We’ve got a professor, check. We’ve got someone in Legal, check. We’ve got a hint of an interracial love story, check. Now let’s get on with the revolution. Did it never occur to the author that she could easily have “nurtured” more characters during the “golden” Oxford years and used them as revolutionaries later on? Couldn’t she introduce them in-between Robin’s rowing sessions? Couldn’t she at least mention their existence? No, she thought that Colonialism Is Bad⁵ was much more important than making the vital revolutionaries anything more than placeholders. Let's not think about the wasted potential here⁶.
Language
It is my opinion that every book with a historical setting should do something to make its language period-specific. Granted, not everyone can write like Susanna Clarke—many end up sounding overly-superficial and constrained, like a woman struggling to breathe in an (historically speaking) inaccurately tight corset—but at least one should make an attempt. While R. F. Kuang writes strong prose, she does not try to move the story into the 1830s. The story is premised on the changes and nuances of language, but ironically, Kuang does not change 21st-century language into anything remotely 1830s. Kuang is a good enough writer that, for the most part, it is not very jarring, but suffice it to say that if the dialogues between Robin & Co. took place in a 2020s online class on British Imperialism, no one would notice anything unusual.
Footnotes
1.
For what I mean by “a realistic, coherent, and convincing way”, think of the episode in which Griffin uses Robin in a Hermes operation: Robin gets a bullet in the arm and had to sew the wound shut (a brilliantly and painfully written scene), but when he finally meets Griffin after months of silence, Griffin expresses absolutely no concern about the fact that Robin could have died, and goes on to tell Robin that he needs his services in an even more dangerous operation. Here Robin gets mad at Griffin, and it’s completely understandable. If Kuang did something like this in the buildup to the murder, we would have understood not only Robin’s motivations for the murder itself but also his friends’ motivations for covering up the crime (because no, I don’t believe that love and sympathy are good enough reasons for someone to help their friend cover up a murder without asking a single question about it, unless there’s some telepathic communication going on).
2.
Let’s think about what we actually know about Robin’s character, his fears, desires, etc., before he commits murder. For the most part he is a likable character, if somewhat bland and diffident. He is obedient to his guardian and professors, loyal to his friends, hard-working as a student, appreciative of good food and books, has barely any life skills but has at least some basic ability to observe and analyze (think of the Pendennis episode, for example, or when Robin finally realized or dared to acknowledge what was going on between Ramy and Letty). His primary fear, before committing the murder, is being expelled from Oxford and sent back to Canton. His secondary fear/desire is to receive instructions from Griffin. His primary desire is to excel at Oxford and maintain the apparent harmony of his friend group (what the author refers to as their “golden years”). Any depth or complexity is lacking.
3.
The story itself would have been more convincing if Kuang didn’t try so hard to justify everything by searing “Colonialism Is Bad” onto her readers’ brains. If she had let readers interpret the story for themselves by simply showing them the injustices committed, the injustices would have spoke louder than a didactic narrator; and precisely because the author was doing so much both in the narrative and in the footnotes, it makes you wonder if she was trying to justify the point to herself, because such effort for an outsider seems superfluous.
Moreover, Kuang’s discussions of anti-imperialism bring nothing new to the table. Is it because everything that has to be said on this topic has already been said? No, not by far. But she doesn’t move beyond the immediately obvious. Why not more subtlety? Why not new perspectives? Sometimes incorporating something that your readers might not notice until later would serve to prove the point that imperialism is often hard to spot, easy to be complicit in, and therefore all the more dangerous. But Kuang seems to be afraid that anything she writes would be interpreted as support for imperialism. I wonder that none of her editors and proofreaders told her otherwise.
4.
Ramy and Letty were characterized more vividly, though their motivations could also have been clearer, or at least Kuang could have planted the seeds of their motivations earlier on in the book. For instance, readers should not be informed of the full extent of Ramy’s hatred of empire only after Robin discovers that Ramy is part of Hermes. His hatred could have been unfolded bit by bit during their “golden years” at Oxford. But perhaps Kuang wanted us to feel the jump, the shock of revelation as it was experienced by the clueless Robin?
5.
If the way I repeat and stress "Colonialism Is Bad" is grating on your nerves, then you are feeling a fraction of the impact exerted by Kuang’s footnotes on her readers.
Kuang clearly does not lack the ability to make a story and a set of characters come alive. The question is, is she willing to make it a priority?
6.