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ecargmura · 8 months

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Babel: An Arcane History Book Review

I’ve been curious about Babel, so I asked my brother to buy it for my birthday earlier this year. I’ve heard different things about R.F. Kuang’s writing, so I decided to not look at Babel’s reviews and dive into the book without any prior knowledge about the plot. How was it? It was both the best thing I’ve read and the most depressing.

Story

The story is about Robin Swift who was on the verge of dying in Canton (Guangzhou) but get saved by Professor Lovell who heals him with a mysterious silver bar. He then gives Robin an offer: come with him to London where he works at the Royal Institute of Translation and become a scholar or become homeless in Canton. Robin chooses the former, so he abandons his Chinese name and becomes Robin Swift; he moves to London where he gets assimilated into the life of an Englishman. He then enrolls in Oxford in the translation department. He becomes friends with Ramy, Victoire and Letty and the two become a tight group of friends. Ramy is from Calcutta, India; VIctoire is from Haiti and raised in France for a time in her life; Letty is an Englishwoman. After a few months of attending university, he is approached by a mysterious man named Griffin who is trying to recruit him into an anti-imperialist society called Hermes. Their goal is to overthrow Britain’s colonialism. Robin joins and then he gets entangled in a war of colonialism and anti-colonialism and his own war of survival.

Magic System

While this is considered a speculative fiction, this is still dark academia, which means there has to be some sort of fantasy element. The magic system of this story revolves around silver. Silver is made into bars where one word is written on one side and then the translation is on the other side. What’s written on the bar is what activates the power. However, in order for the power to be strong, the fluency of the language is most important. Translation is the key factor because the word has to be accurate and precise in order for that power to activate. If you’re unable to write or speak that language then the power weakens. It’s an extremely intricate system that matches the themes of the story.

Characters

I really like the characters and how they are written. Robin is easily my favorite character; I really like reading through his struggles and his desire to survival. If one to describe his character, he is a survivalist; he prioritizes survival above all else to the point that it becomes martyrdom whether it be survival for himself or for his friends. Ramy serves as a good companion to Robin. He’s street smart, charming and prioritizes his friends above all else. I think that he has the best relationship with Robin as he calls him Birdie. Their relationship was my favorite and I hate how everything ended. Victoire also serves as a good parallel to Robin as her story is similar to Robin’s, but her personality is much more headstrong in a way. Griffin serves as a good foil to Robin, from his appearance to his end. Griffin and Robin are half-brothers; both share the same father (Lovell) but how they were raised were completely different. Griffin is described to have similar features to Robin, but his hair and eyes are darker. He’s also more prone to violence and silence; he’s like a darker version of Robin in a way.

While Kuang makes good characters, her villains are infuriatingly well-written too. She knows how to write racist white characters well. Lovell was a scumbag who only thought of colonialism. He hates Chinese people, calls them derogatory words like “barbaric” and describes them as lazy and savage yet he loves Chinese goods like their wallpaper and other objects he curated from his Chinese trips and knows the language; he hates the people yet he’s willing to impregnate two Chinese women from different areas just for them to give birth to tools that can benefit him and the empire—said tools being Griffin and then Robin. Robin once called him out for “killing” his mother but Lovell gets angry and calls his mother “just some woman” or “just a Chink” in certain parts of the book. What’s even more scummy of him is that he has a wife and two children, but he barely visits them. He deserved to die. Good fucking riddance.

Other white people were infuriating too as they were jerks to Robin and his friends; the only nice white person in this story is Mrs. Piper. Letty herself show her true colors towards Chapter 23. Like most white people in this book, Letty is selfish and only thinks for her own benefits. She forces her friends to take a picture with her despite their discomfort. She forces them to go to a ball despite their protests. She gets called out for ignoring their suffering as people of color in London, which causes her to become upset, cry, and the three others had to comfort her. She then later betrays her friends by getting a gun and shooting Ramy, whom she had a crush on, because she didn’t want to be associated with a terrorist group like Hermes (how she described them) and that she thought her friends were insane for squandering their chances for an education at Oxford. Letty’s backstory mainly consists of her inability to get a proper education due to her gender, but eventually gets to Oxford as her brother died in an accident. She’s essentially the 1800’s version of a “Karen”.

Themes

From what I can curate, the major themes of this book are identity and violence. Identity plays a big factor as Robin always sees himself as Chinese despite being mixed and China-born. It’s almost an important factor because Robin’s identity as a Chinaman gets questioned multiple times. He has to assimilate as an Englishman, so he has to speak like one; he even had to discard his own Chinese name as proof of his lost identity. While he is always referred to as a Chinaman from his peers, during his trip to Canton, he tells one guy that he’s from China; the man responds with a scoff and says “No, you’re not” (Page 299). Identity is what drives Ramy and Victoire as well. Ramy has never assimilated as an Englishman like how Robin did; instead, he embraces his Indian heritage and still keeps his Indian name. Victoire was raised to speak French, but given that she’s Haitian (therefore Black), she gets upset that Kreyol isn’t considered an official language and that not being able to speak her mother tongue frustrates her in a way. Identity is what caused Letty to betray her friends. It was because of her identity as an English woman in the 1800’s that she believed what she had done was beneficial for her and her friends.

Loss of identity is also a theme. Language is an identity and losing it affects one’s identity. Loss of identity was what caused Griffin to be discarded for he lost the ability to speak his mother tongue. That was why he faked his death on an expedition and became a member of Hermes. Our other main characters minus Letty lose the ability to speak their mother tongues as time passes in the book. They get upset over this because it’s like losing a part of who they are. They’re foreign-born, but live in London and if they lose their mother tongue, they become closer to Londoners and not as people from their home countries. How they fret over this is actually scary in a way.

Violence is probably the major theme of this story. Violence is the reason why colonialism happens and it’s also the reason why people are affected by it. Violence is the cause of many suffering and sorrow. Everyone in the story is affected by violence in a way. Robin and Griffin are the biggest victims of it. They witness violence, internal and external, and it warps their entire mindset. Robin’s exposure to violence causes him to find a way to survive and to fight for a cause because of his identity. Griffin’s exposure to violence is to fight back with violence as he’s probably one of the more violent characters in the story.

Violence is also the reason why the villains do heinous things and it’s because of it that the main characters fight back. Imperialism is a factor of violence and it’s because of it that other nations outside of Britain suffer while the British do not care. I really like violence is both a force of evil and a method of good in a way; it’s ultimately a morally gray force.

Gripes

My issues with this story is that some chapters feel like a chore to read through. It’s nice seeing Kuang showing off the fruits of her research to make London and Oxford historically accurate, but it does get too much sometimes. Chapter 4 was especially hard to read through because of how long and wordy it was. The footnotes were also a bit of a chore to read; it does feel like I’m reading a non-fiction book whenever I see them. Also, what is up with Chapter 30? It felt incomplete in a way as Chapter 31 starts off with the same two words in Chapter 30.

Conclusion

Despite my gripes, this was an amazing reading experience. I really love every aspect of the story from how it started to how it ended. I really liked how the author wasn’t afraid to explore these kinds of topics in her writing and it showed. I consider Kuang a courageous write for being able to write all of this.

This is definitely a 5-star read and I recommend this to anyone wanting to read dark academia; this is actually my first dive into dark academia and I’d definitely read more. The thickness might be scary, but it’s a fun read; I’m a slow reader so thick books like Babel usually take me around a month and a half to finish, but I actually finished this story in 16 days. It’s something you won’t regret reading!

#babel an arcane history #babel #rf kuang #robin swift #ramy mirza #victoire desgraves #Letitia price #Professor Richard Lovell #Griffin Lovell #review #book #book review #ecargmura #arum journal

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mrhyde-mrseek · 2 years

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What the SMS characters would be like as teachers:

Holmes:

forensics teacher

very unconventional teaching methods

ignores the syllabus completely in favor of what he thinks is most important for an investigator to know

students either adore him or are weirded out by him

shows his classes episodes of Forensic Files just to point out everything the police are doing wrong

Watson:

teaches allied health

everyone’s favorite teacher

people used to go to him instead of the school nurse until he taped a sign to his door saying they couldn’t do that anymore

extremely patient and helpful towards his students

hangs out in Holmes’s classroom during his lunch break

tells so many stories about Holmes to his students

seriously they have bets placed on if they’re fucking or not

The Time Traveller:

the most eccentric engineering teacher the school has ever seen

undoubtedly an expert on the subject but never has a lesson plan

his lessons are very high-energy and enthusiastic and his students genuinely become interested in everything he teaches them

lots of hands-on learning

switches up lessons a lot to keep not only his students but also himself from getting bored

never grades anything on time

Jekyll/Hyde

chemistry teacher (duh)

he’s one of those teachers who are strict and tough, but students still really like them

he and Hyde swap classes occasionally, Hyde usually takes the troublemaking students

he’s very good at threatening them making them behave

Jekyll does a lot of demonstrations

most of the time they work perfectly, sometimes they blow up in his face

(there have been a few times where a beaker has literally exploded, he has set off the fire alarm before on accident)

Griffin:

physics teacher

he hates the vast majority of his students, the feeling is mutual

trust me, he would rather be anywhere else just as much as you

gives a lot of lengthy lectures

also gives out detention to any student who falls asleep during said lectures

hates grading things and puts it off until the very last minute

has made a student who was late to class cry

that hasn’t stopped him from accidentally being 15 minutes late himself for the exact same reason (he slept through his alarm)

Victor:

teaches anatomy and biology

he may be a teacher but nobody ever said he was any good at it

his experiments are the most unusual of all the science teachers in the building

barely talks to any of the other teachers

stays at the school late into the night most days, his students are beginning to suspect he’s nocturnal

they’re also slightly suspicious he’s committed a murder because this guy is almost our age, how does he know so much about human anatomy

Gwen:

ancient history teacher

very passionate and fun, all the history nerds love her

her classroom is the best decorated by far

does a really long, really immersive unit on ancient Egypt

starts this unit by showing her students The Mummy, then delving into all the things they got wrong about ancient Egyptian history and archeology

teaches her students how to read hieroglyphs

has SO many stories from her archeological excavations

manages to bring in artifacts she’s found to show her students (and they’re not all from Egypt)

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