I hated The Poppy War but Babel is such a big deal in the speculative fiction genre that I feel obligated to read. Plus, I’ve had numerous people point out to me that it’s a very different book. This does actually cover some of the same ground and shares similar themes but it really is a much better book and I’d attribute that to Kuang’s writing skill having greatly improved since then. The characters this time around are much more convincing and it’s exhilarating how this is at once a love letter to Oxford and a condemnation of what the British Empire did to be able to afford to build the place. Even so, it has too many flaws for me to consider it a great book. It fails particularly towards the end as the climax is so obvious and made possible only because the great and mighty of the Empire act so dumbly.

The setting is an alternate version of Victorian England in which bars of silver can be inscribed with words of different languages to harness magical effects. After his family dies of the plague, an orphan is brought by Professor Richard Lovell to England to be raised as his ward. The boy takes on the name Robin Swift and is tutored in Greek and Latin. When he comes of age, he is sent to the Royal Institute of Translation, or Babel, at Oxford which is the center of England’s silversmithing technology. As Chinese speakers are rare, Swift is meant to assist Professor Lovell in creating and maintaining the silver bars inscribed with Chinese. He joins three other students as first years, Ramy from Calcutta, Victoire from Haiti and Letty, a white British admiral’s daughter. They form an inseparable cohort of friends as only at Babel are foreigners and women admitted as students. One night however, Robin happens across a gang of thieves stealing from Babel. To his shock, one of them is an older boy whose face resembles his own. He is Griffin, one of Lovell’s half-Chinese bastard children like himself, who has left Babel and now is a member of the Hermes Society. He explains that Babel’s technology is what enables the British Empire to dominate and exploit its colonies, and is now fighting to undermine Babel.

This is a complete story in one volume, and that’s always welcome, but it might be also why it feels simplified and even rushed at times. It opens with a preface that describes how the Oxford that appears in the book differs from the real one. That’s a strong indication of how completely focused it is on the university town itself. It’s not just the physical spaces, the storied buildings, the libraries, the cafes, the greens surrounding them and so on. There are also details about the way of life of the Oxford scholar, their calendar of events, manner of dress, customs and even the local vernacular. Much like Robin Swift, Kuang herself seems to have fallen in love with the place during her time studying there and it’s always great fun to read an author gush so enthusiastically about their favorite subject. None of the other locales in the book get this kind of loving treatment. Of course, it all comes crashing down at the end as Kuang tries so very hard to convince the reader of the evils of British imperialism and why colonial exploitation can be fought only through violence. If you have a tower in your book that is named Babel, it’s not hard to guess what happens at the end.

The problem here is that Kuang puts it as if she needs to work very hard to convince us when it’s more likely that most readers are already on her side. I mean, how many of us have gone to Oxford and loves it as much as she evidently does? The lecturing, didactic tone she takes is very off-putting when we’d rather she just go on with the story or tell us something we don’t already know. I also have a real problem with how the British Empire is shown to be ruthless yet at the same time totally incompetent. Given the strategic importance of Babel, it’s incomprehensible why it doesn’t have a full time security force assigned to it. In fact, the translators number so few and yet are so indispensable that they should each have watchers of their own. It’s ridiculous that Babel scholars regularly defect and the powers that be simply accept that as being business as usual. Kuang tries to justify this by claiming the professors are scholars and academics so they’re lax about practical matters like security. But that makes no sense at all. Once power and money come into play, you can sure that the eggheads will be pushed out by the adults.

Kuang is just so very bad at worldbuilding. It’s easy to notice the constraints she is operating under. She needs to have a small group of young scholars with no proclivity for violence to be able to successfully storm the one linchpin of the British Empire. She also needs to ensure that her version of Victorian England looks like a recognizably close facsimile of the real one due to being inspired by the real Oxford. Never mind that the existence of silversmithing magic should in fact drastically alter the course of history and the overall shape of human society. Her many examples of the linguistic match-pairs that drive this magic, exploiting the differences in meaning between words of different language, are always fascinating to read. Her expertise in linguistics is much in evidence and I do so enjoy the digressions about the origins of words in different languages. But I’m not convinced that she did enough research in the other fields that are needed to build her world: economics, logistics, military history etc. As a fan of science-fiction and fantasy, I also note that there’s no epistemic curiosity here about how or why the silversmithing magic works. It’s treated purely as a means to an end for plot purposes. At one point, the characters wonder what happens if they inscribe the different names of God onto a silver bar but that is never followed up on. Kuang makes it clear that this is not her area of interest at all.

This book is much better than The Poppy War in every way, especially in how the characters are more much psychologically complex this time around so this doesn’t read like a young adult novel. Even so, I wouldn’t say that this is well-written. She appears not to know how to write the villain characters, so the final confrontation between, say, Robin and Professor Lovell end up being more of a damp squib without much in the way of catharsis. Just as with the physical fights, the hero gets to shine only they get to confront the strongest possible version of the opponent’s argument, not ones so weak that they don’t sound convincing even to themselves. Politically there is a great deal in here that I disagree with as well. I am of course never in favor of the Luddite movement as the book seems to be against any sort of technological innovation at all. She wants to argue that violence is necessary, something that I can agree with, but also wants to claim that violence is easy to succeed at if you just take the first step, which is so dumb. The whole book is just so flawed in its execution despite its interesting premise. Kuang arrived on the scene at just the right moment offering the right take to win over critics and sweep up the awards but in my opinion this book is way overhyped.