Babel: An Attempted Fantasy Novel of Ideas

Though the magic system is creative and raises some interesting thoughts, Babel was trying to be a novel of ideas offering a strong opposition to colonialism—and in this, it failed.

This is not a review. See why.

Context

In the late 1820s, the young, recently orphaned Robin was torn away from a plague-ridden Canton (modern-day Guangzhou) by the cold, haughty Professor Lovell. At Lovell’s home, Robin is trained in Latin and Greek, as well as enough English and Cantonese to keep his knowledge of both languages intact, until he is eighteen. Then he is sent to the towering Royal Institute of Translation at Oxford, more colloquially known as Babel. There he learns the secret knowledge that’s enabling the British Empire to dominate its rivals: a type of magic known as “silverworking” that depends on silver etched with “match-pairs” (translated pairs of words that have similar but not precisely the same meanings). These are able to create illusions and even affect the material world based on the subtle combinations of meanings they’re imbued with.

This is why Robin has been trained the way he has. There are few Cantonese speakers outside of China, and the emperor has made teaching Cantonese illegal. (The emperor also prefers to hoard silver rather than put it to use, which is why the large Chinese Empire has not risen as a rival to the British.) By being one of the few translators who is fluent in English and Cantonese, Robin can come up with and use match-pairs that almost nobody else could create or use, once he’s trained in etymology, translation theory, and silverworking by Babel. All but one of his Babel cohort have similar backstories, but with different countries and languages. Ramy was taken from a loving family in India because he showed an impressive talent for memory and languages around his family’s employer. Victoire’s family fled Haiti for France due to a civil war in their home country. Though she is fluent in French, this is not what distinguishes her from other Babel scholars; she also speaks Haitian Creole, which is basically unheard-of in Europe.

The cohort become tightly knit, all feeling like outsiders at Babel due to their heritage, sex (Babel is the only college in Oxford that accepts women), or in Victoire’s case, both. But their group implodes when Robin, Ramy, and Victoire decide to steal from Babel because of its being part of a “colonialist system” that they believe has wronged them and their homelands. But the “English rose” of the group, Letty, though she can see that they have been subjected to racism in England, does not accept that there is a need to use violence to overturn the system. The resulting clash leads up to a dramatic finale in which Robin and Letty both make choices they can’t undo.

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Key Ideas in the Book (Overall evaluation: mixed)

• Racism is based on evasion, not ignorance

• There’s an ineffable world of meaning that language is only able to approximate

• “Colonialism” is evil and destructive

Racism is based on evasion, not ignorance

As foreigners in 19th-century Oxford, Ramy, Robin, and Victoire are subject to a lot of prejudice. This takes many forms, from other students casually implying that they can’t possibly be studying at the university to restaurants refusing to serve them to drunk scholars occasionally attempting to assault them. Many of these racists have never encountered people with different skin colors or heritage—though this, of course, does not excuse the behavior. Many of the Oxford residents have never even left England, and those who have traveled often stuck to Europe. Unfamiliarity with different cultures can cause some natural discomfort, though a moral person would never allow that to lead to mistreatment.

But Babel—where the languages a person knows are so essential to his identity that they’re commonly mentioned when a Babbler introduces himself—is different. Many Babblers seem to appreciate Robin and his friends for their minds, and they form genuine connections there. However, a few do still harbor some prejudice, the most infuriating of whom is Professor Lovell. Despite being fascinated by Chinese culture, having traveled to China multiple times, speaking Mandarin, and having adopted two Chinese boys, he nonetheless believes that Chinese people are “by nature, foolish, weak-minded, disinclined to hard work” (42-43). He irrationally dismisses the potential value of all Chinese citizens based on minimal evidence, ignoring the counterexample offered by both his adopted sons, who worked very hard at their studies. Though someone’s culture certainly has an influence on him, everyone has a choice. And millions of people in the same place all being lazy is highly improbable. Lovell’s character shows that racism in many cases is not a result of ignorance, but of deliberately ignoring knowledge, free will, and probability. Of all the racist characters in the book, Professor Lovell is the one I hated most for his terrible treatment of Robin and his mother.

There’s an ineffable world of meaning that language is only able to approximate

The magic system at the heart of Babel—silverworking—depends on a particular view of concepts and language. It works by inscribing two words (a “match-pair”) on a bar of silver, then having someone fluent in both languages speak the words, causing an effect that corresponds to the meanings of the two words. The words are translations of one another, but the strongest match-pairs are ones in which one part of the pair has a slightly different meaning to the other. For example, “Heimlich” in German is an adjective or adverb meaning something secret or furtively done, but it derives from a word that means “home.” As one of Robin’s professors explains, “Put together this constellation of meaning, and what do you get? Something like the secret, private feeling you get from being somewhere you belong, secluded from the outside world” (84). When their professor uses this match-pair as a demonstration (“Heimlich” and “clandestine”), Robin and his friends felt they were alone and safe, somewhere private—though they were in a populated building in the middle of a busy university campus in broad daylight. This magic can create more than psychological illusions though; the right match-pair can make a garden flourish, prevent carriages from crashing, keep a plate hot, cure certain diseases, and create many other effects.

I applaud the creativity behind this magic system, but it’s important to scrutinize the view of language it’s based on. According to Robin’s professors, match-pairs work because there’s some realm of meaning that any language can only approximate. Although philosophers from Plotinus to Wittgenstein have expressed ideas similar to this, it seems most likely to be an application of Marxist theory to language, especially given that other reviewers have noted that Babel embodies ideas put forth by neo-Marxist thinkers.¹ As an essay from the Soviet era explains,

Thus, side by side with the natural phenomena, with the equipment of technology, and with articles for consumption, there exists a special world—the world of signs. . . . A sign does not simply exist as a part of reality—it reflects and refracts another reality. . . . The entire reality of the word is wholly absorbed in its function of being a sign.²

In other words, according to Marxism, both words and signs (symbols) are mere reflections of another world.

In Babel, by using two words that have similar meanings but some difference between them, the match-pairs “tap into” that realm of meaning, and the difference of meaning imbues the silver with the power to cause an effect in the real world. Magic aside, this idea of another realm full of the actual meanings we’re trying to approximate with words is simply false; there is no evidence for it. Language is a conceptual tool. Words label concepts, which are formed by integrating multiple instances of something into a single mental unit. People usually integrate perceptual-level concepts, such as those referring to cats or to tables, in roughly the same ways, because everyone can clearly see the same concretes. Such concepts are easier to translate than more abstract words or phrases. As a simple example, whereas English has one word for “love,” ancient Greek has six.³ Ancient Greek-speakers conceptualized love in a more subdivided way than English-speakers have found to be necessary (though we do sometimes subdivide the concept by modifying the word, such as when we speak of “romantic love” or “maternal love”). This does not mean, as Robin’s professors suggest, that there’s another realm that has the true nature of love in it, and English speakers and Greek speakers are all trying to get as close to it as possible through different means. The idea is pure fantasy.

“Colonialism” is evil and destructive

Kuang frames Babel as an exposé of the harms of colonialism and the need to use violence to resist it; the book’s (rarely used) subtitle is The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution. Given this topic, it could have been (and perhaps was trying to be) a novel of ideas—but it failed in this respect. First, though it uses the term “colonialism” to describe the actions and institutions (real and fictional) of the British Empire, the focus of the novel is not colonialism itself, but on things historically associated with it. The actions focused on in the book are:

1. British entities (with government support) trying to force the Chinese empire to allow them to trade with Chinese citizens, especially opium. This is usually called “gunboat diplomacy”—“negotiating” but with the threat of force.

2. The British occupation of India, which was an instance of colonialism, but which receives relatively little attention. It serves mainly as a background and source of motivation for Ramy.

3. The “Silver Revolution,” in which some manual laborers are being made redundant by silver bars that streamline the manufacturing process. These are created and maintained by Babel-trained, government-employed translators. This is an instance of socialism, since the means of production is government-owned. The Silver Revolution is compared to the Industrial Revolution because both led to the displacement of workers, but it is important to note the different causes of the displacement, as well as how many people the Industrial Revolution lifted out of poverty through steady wages and increased access to food and goods.⁴

4. The slave trade, an abhorrent institution that had existed in a wide variety of contexts both domestic and international, but which was banned in the British Empire prior to Robin going to study at Babel.

Colonialism is when a powerful country sets up a new outpost of their country in a different geographic location, often using force to do so (because by the time formal states became commonplace, most suitable locations for establishing settlements were already part of one such state). The only one of the four cases discussed above that fits this definition is India, which the British forced into being a colony for a time. Mixing together what clearly is colonialism with what clearly isn’t, such as mixing the British occupation of India with the Silver Revolution, creates confusion about the very concept that Kuang regards as “fundamentally unjust” and self-contradictory, a system that’s “built to destroy that which it prizes most,” as one of the older students tells Robin (386).

Another reason Babel fails to be a novel of ideas is because it neither shows the harms of colonialism (besides the fall from prosperity Ramy’s family suffered) nor the actual debates that happened about it at the time. The arguments Robin is influenced by are mostly assertions that what Babel is doing is wrong. The one time there is something resembling a debate between Robin and an ideological opponent, it is really more of a caricature of real-life debates. Here is a representative snippet, in which Mr. Baylis, a representative of a British company that wants to sell opium in China, is talking to Robin:

“The point is free trade between nations. We’re all liberals, aren’t we? There should be no restrictions between those who have goods and those who want to purchase them. That’s justice. . . . There’s nothing we have that those Chinamen want, apparently, except opium. . . . And if I had my way, every man, woman, and child in this country would be puffing opium smoke until they couldn’t think straight.”. . .

“But that’s cruel,” said Robin. “That’s—that’s terribly cruel.”

“It’s their free choice, isn’t it?” Mr. Baylis said. “You can’t fault business. Chinamen are simply filthy, lazy, and easily addicted” (300-301).

Babel is not a good novel of ideas because it is not clear about the main idea it claims to be opposed to, and it does not expand the reader’s understanding of either side of the debate.

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The Vibe

When Robin is at Babel, the book mainly has a “dark academia” vibe; you feel as though you are in an ancient, candlelit library at night. When Robin is with Professor Lovell, you feel the boy’s helpless fury at the older man’s cruelty, and the descriptions tend to be gritty and unpleasant. Toward the end, the novel involves more action, and it becomes more emotionally charged and thrilling—though I never became super attached to Robin or his friends, which limited how much I cared about the outcome of the action.

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Conclusion

Though the magic system is creative and raises some interesting thoughts about the nature of language and translation, Babel was trying to be a novel of ideas offering a strong opposition to colonialism—and in this, it failed.

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Why does fiction affect us so deeply? Why is it so key to human culture? How can we get the most out of it? I’ll be presenting some thoughts on these questions in my talk “Fiction as Soul-Fuel: Why Stories Move Us” at LevelUp Orlando on July 18. You can save 20% by registering with the code fictionosophyLU25

1. Daniel Rabuzzi, “Translation as Oppression and Liberation in Babel,” Chicago Review of Books, August 25, 2022, https://chireviewofbooks.com/2022/08/25/translation-as-oppression-and-liberation-in-babel/.

2. Valentin Nikolaevich Voloshinov, “Marxism and the Philosophy of Language,” translated by Paul Lamplugh, Marxism Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/voloshinov/1929/marxism-language.htm.

3. Some scholars note that only four were commonly used; see Neel Burton, “Did the Greeks Really Have 7 or 8 Words for Love?” Psychology Today, July 19, 2024, https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/ataraxia/202407/did-the-greeks-really-have-7-or-8-words-for-love.

4. Clark Nardinelli, “Industrial Revolution and the Standard of Living,” The Library of Economics and Liberty, https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/IndustrialRevolutionandtheStandardofLiving.html.