Review of Babel: An Arcane History by RF Kuang
A smart and enjoyable alternative history of colonialism
Babel: An Arcane History, winner of the Nebula Award for the best novel of 2022, is a book of and for its time. I mean not the Oxford of the 1830s, where this alternative history is primarily set, but our present. The legacy of Empire — “Empire” in this case refers to the British Empire, specifically, but also to the ethics that underpinned Europeans’ takeover of societies and economies in Africa, Asia and the Americas on the basis of Europe’s supposed superiority as a civilisation — has made the leap from scholarship to acrimonious political debate in Britain.1 We needed a good artistic response to this culture war muddle, and happily in Babel we have a novel that is thought-provoking on the subject but accessible and enjoyable as a story.
The main character, Robin, is a mixed race (Chinese/English) young man who can sometimes pass for white. I am not sure whether Kuang would appreciate the comparison, but it struck me as a brilliant reversal of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. In Kipling’s novel, the orphaned Kim discovers that he is not the “Indian” child everyone believed him to be but is actually British, born to be one of the colonial masters rather than the ruled. In Babel, Robin comes to terms with the limits of his Europeanness because whenever he feels at home in his own skin, inevitably his being mixed race becomes an issue. Robin’s journey towards not belonging begins when as a boy he is rescued from a plague in Canton by an aloof and abusive Oxford professor who becomes his guardian and takes him to England. He is schooled and then sent to Oxford University where he makes friends with other students who are outsiders. But things are not as innocent as they seem at the university. Robin and his friends must choose either to pretend everything is normal or accept their role in world events… And that is as much as I can say without giving away the plot.
Babel has two brilliant premises, one of which is imaginary and one which is historically true. The flight of imagination is that translation is literally magic: Technology in the world of the novel runs on bars of silver inscribed with words in different languages that when spoken activate the gaps between the meanings to create a magical effect, like curing illness, turning someone invisible or making a carriage run. The Royal Institute of Translation in Oxford has a near monopoly on the process of creating the bars, which is essentially what Robin and his polyglot friends are being trained to do. The historically accurate premise is that Empire was built on knowledge as much as on superior technology or military might. The East India Company’s success in trade came in large part from the fact that their information gathering apparatus stretched from London to Java so among other things they knew the prices of every commodity in between. This superior information, knowing when to buy and when to warehouse or sell something across a vast number of markets, displaced many local actors who could not compete. And of course when the information advantage was not enough to co-opt or displace the competition, they could send in the gunboats.
Some of the Oxford details are very well observed. The Royal Institute of Translation where the main characters are students (and which has no analogue in the real world) is in a tower, so of course it is called “Babel” like the biblical tower that had to do with languages. And of course the people within it are by extension called “Babblers”. That is pitch perfect, the most Oxford thing imaginable.2
The novel is multilingual, with Chinese being a particular delight. Such rich play with language is not something I have seen in another alternative historical novel.3 The innovative storytelling through etymologies makes sense in the context of the plot and is genuinely intriguing — saying a novel has amusing philological content is not something the publisher’s marketing department would put on the back cover but I think it might actually be what the people want in this case. When the footnotes address events in the lead up to the First Opium War, they are a mix of real history and the fantastical. Part of the fun — and value — of alternative histories is working out what is “true” from our perspective and what was made up.
Babel is interested in showing the workings of Empire, which reminded me of some of Amitav Ghosh’s historical novels, but it is more accessible than Ghosh’s meticulously researched works, certainly in Britain where many more people know Oxford than Bengal. It is unapologetically a book about race, with trenchant observations like a white woman needing to centre herself in a conversation with three people of colour. A novel is the right format to make people think about these issues when the history itself is either too technical or dry. Fiction, I probably need not say, can be entertaining while inspiring us to learn more and change the way we think about things.
Kuang’s novel particularly matters within the context of modern politics of “wokeness” because Britain’s relationship with its erstwhile Empire is at a crossroads. The Rhodes Must Fall campaign in 2015 (which jumped from the University of Cape Town to Oxford the following year) crystallised a lot of things people had been saying since the anti-colonial movements in the twentieth century.4 Now it had become a live issue and those in power felt they had to push back. Basically the British ruling class reflexively defended Empire with such fervour that one could image there was still an actual political Empire to defend. It also got tangled up in the nostalgia fuelling Brexit (see, for example, the phrase “Empire 2.0” which was a horrifying term that people actually used for a brief period).
Since Empire is now a culture war issue, we are required to think of it either as Good (albeit with rough edges, even the most fervent proponents of this view would admit) or Bad. Both poles preclude engaging with the legacy of Empire with any nuance, which is the worst outcome. I have a theory that many people who had a personal role in running the Empire saw enough horror to have complicated feelings about their complicity. You can see this contemporary view of Empire (an alternative to the more typical jingoism) hinted at in memoirs and literature of the time. Obviously, not everyone involved in the grubby business had as complete a turnaround as say George Orwell (whose account of a grisly event when he was a young colonial police officer in Burma, “Shooting an Elephant,” is rightly a classic in the genre you could call “recording the moment when one’s innocence dies”). Since virtually everyone personally involved in colonialism is now dead, my theory goes, this has opened space for uncritical worship of Empire because for the last two or three decades there has no longer been any white British person who could say, “actually I was there and it was awful”.
The reason we need to understand the British Empire (and the French/German/Spanish/Portuguese/Japanese/etc. Empires) is that it made all of us, coloniser and colonised both. Maintaining an accurate balance sheet of Good and Bad is irrelevant — what matters is that we are here, and we are who we are, and our societies with their strengths and weaknesses are what they are because of the enormous historical churn of Empire. It contained many, many contradictions because it was so vast territorially, politically and culturally. Engaging with the past is hard at the best of times: In her Reith lecture in 2017, the novelist Hilary Mantel said that “History is not the past. It is the method we have evolved for organising our ignorance of the past.”
Present-day Oxford has its share of deniers of imperial brutality just like the rest of the UK. In both our reality and in the novel’s, Oxford was, and is, an epicentre of logistical support for, benefit from, and defence of Empire. Though some Oxford students and academics are actively wrestling with the legacy of empire to “decolonise” the university, to many, Oxford is a place whose philosophy must be “semper eadem” (always the same). Those words are inscribed in All Souls College, the same college whose library was built using the fortune of slaveowner Christopher Codrington (c. 1668-1710).5 The highest-profile recent intellectual justification of Empire to come from Oxford is the book Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning by the Oxford theologian (and would be historian) Nigel Biggar. I will not review it here, but suffice it to say, I found it sloppy as historical research and unconvincing. Fundamentally there is a philosophical black hole at the heart of the project: Biggar presumes that if colonialism was not a good thing then the West of today risks losing faith in itself. This is an obvious tautology. And so to protect us from ourselves, there have been, for example, attacks on the National Trust for pointing out when it talks about its heritage properties that the promises of the people who benefitted from Empire were not objective truth. (In other words, that impressive old pile in an idyllic country estate could have been built with money stolen from brown people even as the people who lived in that grand house would have claimed they were just trying to “civilise” said brown people. Why should we believe them?)
Frequently defenders of Empire present a revisionist history in which the Empire’s benevolence appears as the only sensible history. That history is revisionist because it excludes many voices and only draws from a strain of historiography that was intended to craft a positive legacy rather than present a holistic understanding of what happened. “Rhodes Must Fall” demonstrated the difficulty of grappling with a legacy when the person in question is clearly an arsehole: reputation-laundering works. Rhodes put his name on the world’s most famous postgraduate scholarships and there is a prominent statue of him on a college building he paid for on Oxford’s High Street.6 We come to the tautology again: Surely we only put up statues to great men who did great things and name scholarships after nice people? In fact, it turns out that people with a lot of money pay for conspicuous good works — often knowing full well the positive effect it will have on their perception in society — and such charity has no connection to the ethics of where the money came from.7 The other thing that unfortunately works is what we could call toxic self-congratulation. As the Caribbean historian Eric Williams observed, “the British historians wrote almost as if Britain had introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it”. Along those lines, the Life in the UK book, which is the basis for the British citizenship test, spends far more text on the abolition of slavery than on what slavery actually was or how Empire enabled it.
Rhodes was not yet born in the chronology of Babel, and yet there is no question that in the extended Babel Cinematic Universe, he would have been a super-villain. Here is what it boils down to: Novels can nudge our imagination in the right direction to see the past with a clarity that scholarly history often cannot.
The novel does have some weaknesses, particularly in its dialogue and the characterisation of its villains. It has an unusual and somewhat (unintentionally?) hilarious preface saying that liberties were taken in the worldbuilding, and that readers need to get over themselves if they notice incongruences with the real Oxford and its real university. I am not sure this works for alternative history, where I have always understood the ground rule to be that everything should be historically accurate unless there is a specific artistic reason for it not to be. I was taken out of the story not by wonky Oxford geography — which the preface seems particularly touchy about — but rather by the anachronism of the way characters spoke. To my Anglo-American ear, characters generally use the idioms of our own time, in many cases with a particularly contemporary American usage. If that was in fact an artistic choice, it did not work for me, and if it was accidental then… oops. A few examples I noted of things that could not have been said in the early nineteenth century (at least the early nineteenth century as we know it) are “interview subject,” “Allah Hafiz” a neologistic Urdu phrase (meaning goodbye), and a weak joke about academic tenure made by a professor which doubly does not work because academic tenure in the modern sense did not exist in the nineteenth century8 and until as late as about a decade ago Oxford reserved the title “professor” for senior academics holding a named chair in a subject.
Such details are obviously trivial — I am almost embarrassed of having fallen into the trap of having to describe some of them to make my point — but a more significant problem is in how the novel’s plot fails its characters towards the end when character motivations break down. Without spoiling, I can only say that the villains in particular do not make sense. They each have their Bond-villain monologues that are flat and clarify as little as what Ernst Stavro Blofeld says as he strokes his evilly fluffy cat. Babel is so wise about how Empire corrupts those who are complicit in it that the end disappointed me: It turns out the bad guys were just cartoonishly bad all along. I did reflect on whether I as a white middle-class man was having a #notallwhitepeople moment because I felt some sympathy for the colonisers in the novel, but that’s really not it.
The first two-thirds of the book are a solid friends-at-university story with a significant turn, but the end is rushed, feeling more like getting pieces in position than telling the story at its natural pace. Even the mechanics of the silver translation bars seems to be problematic at the end. It is a crucial plot point that the exact moment of failure of “expired” silver bars can be known. This fact just materialises when required, shoe-horned into the idea that the bars are intentionally made with less pure silver so that they must be more frequently replaced, making society more dependent on Babel with its near monopoly on the production of the bars.
Babel is a good read but more than that is profoundly important book as a conversation-starter for a discussion that to my mind is crucial at this moment. Though I find some faults with it, the novel is remarkably rich in ideas and panache considering that its author was in her mid-twenties when she wrote it.
In the US, recent political backlash around speaking frankly about the legacy of slavery, the Civil War, and the displacement of Native Americans has very roughly the same contours as the British conversation about Empire.
I remember as an undergraduate, freshly arrived in Oxford from the US, finding it hard to believe that various lists of student slang terms were not an elaborate prank being played on foreign students. In fact, I soon learned, virtually everything and everyone at Oxford has been given a silly name.
Perhaps Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose counts. And maybe the long, often untranslated passages of ecclesiastical Latin in Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz could be called play with language and the novel could be called alternative history. Of course, “hard” science fiction is full of philosophical thinking about how languages, and in particular made-up languages, shape consciousness, e.g. Arkady Martine, Samuel R. Delany, C.J. Cherryh or China Miéville.
That is, what activists are highlighting now has a clear lineage to people like Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, to name the two mid-twentieth-century anti-imperial thinkers I know best, as well as to the architects of the independent nations that emerged from colonial empires. The point is that the anti-imperial ideas being dismissed as “new-fangled woke nonsense” (or whatever) are venerable, some of them first articulated more than a century ago, even if aspects of the culture war in which they are combatants are new.
Codrington’s name was controversially dropped from the library in 2021 but a massive statue of him remains in the building.
Rhodes’s will makes for confusing reading because the scholarship scheme is explained as a way of keeping young colonials loyal to the Empire (and to what a government today might call “British values”) but also stipulates that there be no religious or racial bar for scholarship recipients. I think the contradiction is solved when you consider the territories covered by the “Colonial Scholarships” (as they were called), namely South Africa/Rhodesia, Australia/New Zealand, Canada (including Newfoundland), Bermuda and Jamaica: These were settler colonial societies with sizeable white populations so Rhodes probably imagined that there would be plenty of excellent white young men (and they were all men until women became eligible for the scholarships in 1977) to choose from in each place. As happened, it was for decades a scholarship for white students (with a few exceptions) while purporting to be open to all races.
In this context, I think of the Sackler family (of Opioid Epidemic fame). Had their names not been emblazoned in brass letters high on the wall in dozens of museum galleries, their disgrace would have come more quickly.
In fact, we do not really have academic tenure in the UK even today: a British university post is either “permanent” or not, and the process at the end of the probation period for a permanent appointment is nowhere near as complicated or likely to fail as going up for tenure in the US.