Alice Law and Peter Murdoch are graduate students studying Magick at Cambridge University. They are both being advised by the star of the department, Jacob Grimes, a professor they fear and worship in roughly equal measures. Desperate to secure a rare job placement in academia, they would do anything for Grimes, including, as it turns out, taking a literal trip to Hell for him. When a seemingly routine Magick trick goes wrong and sends their advisor to the afterlife, Alice and Peter are each determined to bring him back. After all, what could look better on a c.v.?
This absurdity is the set-up for Kuang’s extended “Hell is just like grad school” metaphor, a groaner of a gag that gets staler with each repetition. As Alice and Peter conduct their search, they must make their way through each circle of Hell, encountering along the way a succession of dead fellow academics displaying the particular sins that souls must expiate before they can pass through and reincarnate. Kuang elucidates the map of hell using principles drawn from mathematics and classical logic, but if she truly understands the topics she wields, the reader is presented with precious little evidence. Kuang certainly is good at name-dropping ancient thinkers and their paradoxes, though explaining their meaning to her audience is apparently something she doesn’t have time for in this nearly 600-page novel.
Surely, then, Kuang must devote a lot of building up the characters of Alice, Peter, and Professor Grimes, and creating a secondary network of supporting characters to build out the world they inhabit, right? Eh, not so much. We spend a lot of time with Alice and Peter, mostly getting Alice’s point-of-view on their past and present interactions. Alice is committed to academia, but there’s never really a sense that she actually cares about Magick, and certainly no real explanation as to why she would. To be fair to Kuang, other characters keep telling this to Alice, but it never seems to sink in. To be unfair to Kuang, I’m not sure why she centered a big novel like this on a character she clearly doesn’t like very much.
Peter is a handsome and brilliant scholar whose apparent indifference to the actual work of scholarship infuriates Alice and the rest of their cohort. Alice is preoccupied with the idea that Peter gets away with things she never could because of his charm and his gender, a notion that is reinforced by Professor Grimes. As an aside, I’m sure you have a question in mind about Alice and Peter, but I’m not going to talk about that because the book treats it as some big revelation, but I mean, come on, “yes, of course, eventually” is the answer to your question.
The real question, though, is why anyone would care for these characters, or about anything that happens in the book at all. Alice and Peter’s decision to enter Hell (which, according to rules established by Kuang, saps each of them of half of their lifespan) is inexplicable within the context of the story, even as Kuang desperately tries to rationalize it for both of them. Grimes is a complete cipher in the early parts of the story, making it impossible for the reader to care what becomes of him. Later revelations only serve to make Alice’s choices even more unfathomable.
So we’ve got two hastily-defined, hard to like characters embarking on an epic journey to save the life of, basically, a non-entity that eventually graduates into a completely unlikable character. Along the way, Kuang populates Hell with a series of trite, boring characters that mainly serve as mild satires of the world of academia.
I think by now, you’ve gotten the drift. I couldn’t stand this book and literally can’t wrap my head around why anyone else would. Somewhere in the vast middle between the front and back covers, everything on the page turned to gobbledygook, and my brain began to swim on me. This is my third go at reading R.F. Kuang, and unless I lose my mind it will be my last.