1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to England by Professor Lovell, a mysterious Englishman who happened to appear at his mother’s deathbed . Once there, he trains for years at a grueling pace in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel. (And yes, it’s a tower; subtlety, this England doth not have it.)
Babel is the world’s center for translation and, more importantly, magic. (Because of course England is the world’s center; and they complain about China referring to itself as Zhongguo (中國), or “Middle Kingdom”) Silver working—the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars—has made the British unparalleled in power, as its knowledge serves the Empire’s quest for colonization. (Yet they still apparently lost the American War of Independence.)
For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge, not so much for knowledge’s sake as for England’s glory. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland; a place he’s basically turned his back on, and a fact that it takes him almost the entire book to realize. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to stopping England’s march to conquer the globe. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, representing the two biggest desires England has at the time; power and money, Robin must decide…
Can powerful institutions be changed from within slowly and methodically, or does revolution always require sudden violence?
I don’t 100% know what I thought of this book. I also don’t know what I can say that’s not going to make me sound like a tone-deaf middle-class white woman, all of who are, according to Kuang, the enemy. Truthfully, I don’t think I was the target audience for this book at all. In some ways the characters (especially Robin, Ramy, and Victoire) were so well described, in other ways no was fleshed out beyond slightly more than skin deep. Though isn’t it lovely we never find out what Robin’s birth name was? Guess it goes to show the Colonization the English were big on. Letty was always the most irritating out of the four of them. For an author who received a degree from Oxford, Kuang comes across as very anti-English and anti-Oxford. Which yes, England was (and still is for a large part) very overbearing, arrogant, class-snobbish and jingoistic, but still. Could not figure out if Robin and Ramy are supposed to have a homoerotic subtext, or if they’re just supposed to be very close, kindred spirit school chums. Know Ramy always loathed Letty; proably Robin was the one who had the most use for her out of the four of them, and I think that was probably because for the longest time Robin was the one who saw their “other-ness” and how English society would really not accept them the least. Am so glad that Lovell just seemed to decide that manufacturing his contribution to the Babel workforce. Did not appreciate the insinuation though that as I’m not a minority, this book isn’t really for me as I “wouldn’t get it” and I’m “part of the problem”. Or is that just a case of never-before realized White Privilege causing me to feel that way? And, as history as frequently shown us, do these riots actually accomplish any change in the end? Or is Robin just England’s answer to Enjolras?
I enjoyed it, and the ending broke my heart (though to be honest, the only surprising fate was Victoire’s), but as I said I’m not sure I was the target audience. I have no problem reading a book where the protagonist doesn’t look or think like me; it’s just a little hard when the underlying impression is that the author feels that if you don’t look liker Robin, just don’t bother picking up the book.