I was on the verge of DNF’ing Babel by R. F. Kuang so many times. I don’t know what compelled me to finish; I seem incapable of DNF’ing a book any longer. I have no idea how this book is so hyped and awarded. It’s the worst book I’ve read so far this year.
I can’t escape a feeling at least some of those positive reviews are because the novel’s themes are anticolonialism and antiracism and therefore automatically “important.” At that point, you say to the book: no duh, what else can you teach me through emotional response (which is largely contingent on character depth, and this book only has token one-dimensional characters), insights I haven’t seen articulated as well elsewhere (Kuang literally could only articulate British colonialism = harmful, racism = bad), or transporting me into another world through plot or incredible world-building (Kuang used our world as her base to introduce small fantasy elements, and there were more plotholes in the second half of the novel it’s actually embarrassing). So Kuang didn’t deliver on anything. I have no problem with books mainly concerned with delivering a political message, but I dislike when authors sacrifice story for said message, because it defies what fiction is often supposed to do—deliver a point in a more emotionally connecting way through a transporting story and thus delivering a stronger teaching moment. And that requires subtlety—something I definitely did not employ in that last sentence.
But before I go further, let’s go over some of the things I did actually like…and then explain how even those elements are still deeply flawed. I thought the singular magical element was actually really cool. Two words, each from a different language that have similar meanings but are not exact translations of one another, are written on opposite sides of a silver bar, and the tension present in the hidden meaning of the inexact translation provides a magical effect, reproducing that hidden element that cannot be translated into some tangible effect. I’m not sure if I explained that well, but I thought it was interesting. Except that it had little to no effect on the world. The novel’s world functioned exactly as ours except carriages could run faster and someone could be cured of cholera on a silverworker’s random whim. The only other thing I liked in the novel was that some of the translation bits were actually interesting. I like reading about etymology, and I have always been interested in what is lost in the process of translation. But a few other reviews I’ve read brought up a point that I hadn’t considered. For a book that is so focused on the integrity of preserving language accurately, Kuang didn’t seem to care about writing dialogue in a manner that is historically accurate, but used terms from our modern political landscape. But I admittedly didn’t actually clock this while reading, it’s just me feeding into the rage bait of other 1- or 2-star reviews on Goodreads.
These are the plot holes that infuriated me while reading the last third of the book. Up to that point, I was bored, but I could calmly tolerate reading the book. But then the author just completely gave up. Note, there are spoilers in this paragraph. 1) Robin took the first night watch shift out of his four friends, and yet he was still on his shift at three in the morning and still had an hour to go. That was a four hour shift. Were they planning on sleeping for 16 hours? 2) Griffin had “heard” that Robin had killed their father, but Robin had just told Anthony, who acted as though it was news to him, and then Robin and Anthony were together until Griffin walked in, so not sure when or how Griffin heard. 3) When Griffin saves Robin and Victoire from prison, he made such an awful sound through magic that he drove all the inhabitants of the building down to a certain floor, but Robin and Victoire, who were obviously on a floor that Griffin had forcefully evacuated, didn’t hear a thing and remained asleep. 4) I have no idea why, when he was trying to save Griffin, Robin could make himself and Victoire disappear, but apparently he just didn’t think of including Griffin in that invisibility bubble, signing his death sentence? He made multiple people disappear very early on in the novel, so we know it’s possible. 5) Why would Anthony tell Victoire about what Griffin considered the safest of his safe houses where he kept all of his secret correspondence? This organization had been touted as the most secretive societies who wouldn’t even tell you things you needed to know. And Griffin would have killed Anthony if he had known. It made no sense except that they needed a safe house at that moment. 6) It’s sooo easy to infiltrate the Babel tower (after Robin and Victoire do it, the narrative literally says “That was too easy”) until it’s someone other than our protagonists trying it, and then it’s utterly impenetrable. 7) And then, to make Letty into more of a villain non-entity, Robin goes rewriting history, saying that Letty could have shot any one of them, but Letty had aimed for her love interest, Ramy, who had rejected her. But if you go back to that scene, Letty was aiming for Victoire to stop her from destroying a list and Ramy steps in front of the gun to protect her. So what are we supposed to believe? 8) Finally, Letty “hunting Victoire to the ends of the earth” makes absolutely no sense for Letty’s barely fleshed out character; it’s laughable.
After Kuang gave up, the character development took a serious hit as well. Not that the character development was even decent in the first half, but it totally went out the window in the second. Robin? Our personality-less protagonist who relies on everyone else to form his opinions for him and displays very little emotions regarding himself or other people? Neither being beaten by Professor Lovell with a fire poker or learning that Professor Lovell had basically let his mother die so he could use Robin as an intellectual experiment got much of a rise out of him in the first half. But in the second half? Let’s make him into an impulsive decision-making monger who is entirely fueled and blinded by anger.
The other three parts of the friend group, Ramy, Victoire, and Letty, are surprisingly heard from very little throughout the book except for when they were saying their token statements that further their political archetypes. But I would say Letty was fairly passive until Kuang decided to make her into a hunter of her friends. And Victoire suddenly went from a character who only existed to represent intersectionality and to occasionally defend Letty’s belonging in the friend group to Robin’s rock.
My last complaint, I promise: Some of the footnotes made sense, but a few were storylines that she seemed to have forgotten in the actual narrative so had to include in a footnote as a genuine afterthought, passing off laziness and lack of forethought into an impression of academia?
This book was a very ambitious undertaking executed in the laziest way possible. She wanted it to be a fantasy, but only introduced one fantastic element that had very little impact on our reality, and did absolutely no worldbuilding. She wanted to explore important themes of colonialism and racism but added nothing to the conversation and regurgitated everything we already know, over and over. She wanted her characters to be mouthpieces of her message but didn’t bother to flesh them out so her audience could emotionally connect. And she was so focused on her theme that plot fluidity was far from a priority.
