Babel
- Author: R.F. Kuang
- Page count: 557
- Started on: 2026/07/25
- Finished on: 2026/08/20
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
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After Yellowface and The Poppy War Trilogy, Babel is the third book by R.F. Kuang that I’ve read. In Babel, a Chinese orphan is brought to 19th-century Oxford to study translation and magical silver-working. As he uncovers the university’s role in British imperialism, he must choose where his loyalties lie.
Like The Poppy War Trilogy, this book puts a fantastic spin on a real period of history. But while the former focused on a military conflict inspired by 1930s and 1940s China, Babel explores 1830s academia, linguistics and colonialism. The Babel story mostly plays out in Oxford, with a few excursions into China. It starts as a pretty small story, but expands drastically in scope before settling into an explosive finale.
Like The Poppy War Trilogy, this book showcases Kuang’s talent for building wonderful alternate worlds and histories. The magic system in Babel (based on semantic gaps in translated word pairings) is truly fascinating, and opens up lots of possibilities. And the almost-but-not-quite-real Oxford is well done. The story Kuang sets in this world is also not bad, just somewhat predictable, which is again similar to how I felt about The Poppy War Trilogy. All of this would have easily made this a four-star story.
What keeps it from reaching four stars is the same problem that I have with all of Kuang’s writing: her characters are incredibly one-dimensional and her writing often strikes me as very pedantic. The protagonist in this story, for example, mostly comes across as a weak-willed boy who wants to please people, but then suddenly in the final chapters he becomes overly strong-willed. This could show character development, of course, but the switch is sudden and seems more driven by the needs of the plot rather than by a developing character. The antagonists show even less development, though, and it repeatedly feels like I’m being “yelled” at about colonialism and capitalism. Despite wholeheartedly agreeing with those sentiments, the tone is just off-putting.
Given that I’ve repeatedly noticed this in Kuang’s work, it’s fair to ask why I picked up this book. And I might say that it happened to be on sale (which indeed it was), but truth be told, the worlds Kuang creates are truly fascinating to me, I just regularly wish somebody else would write the stories in her worlds.
