Bingo: History; Passport: China
Babel is historical fiction stirred with magic, the story of imperialism set in a world just a sidestep from our own told through the eyes of an outsider awakening to harsh realities.
We meet Robin as a small boy who has survived a cholera outbreak that has killed his mother and ravaged his birthplace of Canton and is taken to England by his mentor. His Chinese name is unimportant to Professor Lovell, so we never learn it.
Robin’s skill with language is honed by tutors until he is old enough to be sent to Oxford, to study at the Royal Institute of Translation, otherwise known as Babel. The Institute is the engine of this version of the British Empire, creating and maintaining magical silver artifacts that are powered by the gaps in meaning between translated pairs of words.
On his arrival at Oxford Robin immediately forms a strong bond with his classmate Ramy, a Muslim from Calcutta, which quickly expands to include the other members of their cohort, Haitian Victoire and Letty, an Englishwoman. In this alternative Oxford, Babel’s prestige stretches the social fabric enough to allow these students who don’t conform with the racial and gender constraints to attend, but not to be truly included. Robin quickly learns that he and Ramy are “men at Oxford, but not Oxford men.” The girls are not even allowed to live on campus.
The story skips through a few years as the cohort study and learn, till a field trip to China brings all the tensions of empire to the surface. Robin can’t hide from the truth that the British are turning Ramy’s country into a narco-military state to forcibly push drugs into his own so that the English can monopolise silver, used to power military conquest, slavery and fripperies for the rich. Is resistance futile?