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Reading: Babel: An Arcane History
Anti-colonialist propaganda masquerading as best-selling fiction
And I love it.
It matters who the good guys and the bad guys are in fantasy fiction because it tells readers who the good guys and the bad guys are in real life. In Babel, R.F. Kuang uses her novel to deliver a scathing critique of colonialism and white supremacy.
The full title of R.F. Kuang’s Babel: An Arcane History is intriguing: Babel or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution. It hints at something serious.
After I read the title, I sort of forgot about it because the book seems so innocuous at first. We are given a “boy-who-lived” scenario, where the protagonist, Robin, is plucked from a pandemic in Canton, China in the 1820s and brought to England by a mysterious professor. Robin is educated by private tutors until he comes of age to attend Oxford in the 1830s, which in this book happens to have a magical school right in the middle of it. Robin has a cohort of close friends in the magical school who are thrown together in intense situations: Letty (English from Brighton), Ramy (Muslim from India), and Victoire (Haitian by way of France).
In this version of Oxford, the magical school is an institute for translation, and the trick…
