Babel : Or the Necessity of Violence

an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution

by R. F. Kuang

Paperback, 542 pages

English language

Published April 2, 2022 by HarperCollins Publishers.

ISBN:: 978-0-00-850182-2

(61 reviews)

From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal retort to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British empire.

Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.

Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years 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.

Babel is the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. 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.

For Robin, Oxford is a …

Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.

Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years 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.

For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to stopping imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide…

Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence?

16 editions

Jaelyn reviewed Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution by R. F. Kuang

Review of 'Babel' on 'Storygraph'

5 stars

But to power its silver industrial revolution, Britain not only needs to plunder the world’s silver but also its languages for new translations and translators who are fluent enough to dream in multiple languages.

Enter the students of Babel, Oxford’s translation institute. Robin is taken from his home in Canton, his family dead from Choelra which could have been cured by the enchanted silver England hoards, by an Englishman who trains him up to serve at Babel. To put his language and culture at the service of the Empire.

I’m late to the …

In an alternate Oxford where the British Empire is founded upon silver, enchanted by the act of translation; two words in different languages on each side sharing the same root but with slightly differing meanings. These silver bars make ships faster, factories more efficient and bridges more stable. Those put out of work are just collateral malcontents.

But to power its silver industrial revolution, Britain not only needs to plunder the world’s silver but also its languages for new translations and translators who are fluent enough to dream in multiple languages.
Enter the students of Babel, Oxford’s translation institute. Robin is taken from his home in Canton, his family dead from Choelra which could have been cured by the enchanted silver England hoards, by an Englishman who trains him up to serve at Babel. To put his language and culture at the service of the Empire.

I’m late to the party on this one and wanted to ensure I’d read this before the end of the year. It’s a beautiful exploration of culture, language and translation; but also a hard-hitting account of colonialism, imperialism, racism and capitalism at its very worst. It strikes a hopeful yet bitter note of revolution and revolt against the seemingly overwhelming and immovable force that is the empire and how it radicalises people against it.

There were so many moments in this book exploring these themes which I adored. Especially around the beauty of language and its relation to our cultural thought and perspectives. But perhaps the hardest being around the dehumanisation of those in the global south and the need for the whites to centre themselves in every debate while participating in or overlooking the racism right in front of them.

But what surprised me the most was that a book of this weight and length never felt slow to me. It was so engaging in what it was saying that I would happily sit through years of lectures at Babel. Maybe not taking the tests though…

EtherReads reviewed Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution by R. F. Kuang

Review of 'Babel' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Honestly if I could give this book 6 stars, 8 stars, 10 stars, I would. It is a brilliant piece of alternate history with a fantastically inventive magic system and its message is incredibly relevant to the world today. A biting and merciless examination of colonialism which still manages to offer hope, but not a worthless, nebulous hope. This is a hope that requires will and sacrifice to back it up. An utterly brilliant book which I would encourage everyone to read.

Enno reviewed Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution by R. F. Kuang

Review of 'Babel : Or the Necessity of Violence' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

In early victorian England, foreign translators at Oxford try to take on the empire, which works on a translation-based kind of magic that involves silver bars. Many times, we think it's all over for our protagonists, and they receive a miraculous rescue, it's quite gutting. Until at the end, they don't.

I liked it, the magic is very clever, the parallels to our real world are there, although events have been altered. There's still an opium war, an abolitionist movement, English exceptionalism and disdain for others, all the loathsome things that make up British Empire.

broonie reviewed Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution by R. F. Kuang

Review of 'Babel : Or the Necessity of Violence' on 'Storygraph'

4 stars

At times the book seems to want the characters to be complex people, but most of the time they are more there to fill a more fable like role and teach us lessons, similarly for the world building. Either of these approaches could work well but done at the same time they undermine each other.

Hyzie reviewed Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution by R. F. Kuang

Review of 'Babel : Or the Necessity of Violence' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

This was on the list of books I went back and forth on reading. The concept sounded interesting, but, to be quite frank, it also sounded potentially boring. I'm glad I did go ahead and read it.

I won't argue that it isn't slow (it is), but it hits that lovely academia feel that I so loved in The Historian (and that made me at least start grad school. Grad school is not actually like this for most people, alas.), and I found the entirety of Babel and Oxford itself charming. I understood why the characters got so caught up in the world, and I can't say I wouldn't have done exactly the same.

My problems with the novel (and the reason why, despite devouring it rather quickly, it is not a five star for me and I actually debated on giving it a three) are mostly the last half. Things pick up a bit there, but to the detriment of the feel of the book, even if it does serve the story.

The characters were interesting, and I did get attached to Robin, but they were held at arms' length by the text itself, which felt strange given how close we were told over and over that they were. All three of the other main characters in this adventure kept coming up with surprises late in the game that didn't feel like real surprises so much as "oh, somehow this character trait never came up at all despite everyone being best friends and oh-so-close," and that didn't feel great.

The magic system, though, was super neat. Watching pairs of words get traced through the lineage of history felt cool every time it was done, and it's not something I've seen before. I understood why the characters found it so enthralling, and that made it much easier for me to get excited about it.

There was a moment that was supposed to surprise us later in the novel that seemed too telegraphed for our theoretically very clever characters to have not seen. Maybe I was supposed to count on a relationship that had been built to make them feel blinded by it, but the relationship was never built to the point where I believed that.

The ending is a bit rough in that Robin seems to devolve into a different character rather quickly. I don't know that it is wrong that he does, given everything that happens (trying to speak around spoilers here), but the suddenness of it after the slow pace of a lot of the rest of the book felt bizarre. I didn't hate the ending, but it was not what I was hoping for and it didn't have the feeling of rightness that makes up for getting an ending you don't love. I'm not considering it a spoiler that something with the word "Revolution" in the title doesn't end perfectly cleanly.

Overall, I enjoyed this quite a bit, but more for the delights of watching a neat magic system get attached to a dark academia book than because things hung together perfectly. If that's your cup of tea, I do recommend this, but it's a soft four and if you are not up for footnotes and lots of discussion of how the empire is problematic (I mean, it definitely was, but there's a ton of coverage of it in here), it may be a bit slow.