Babel by R F Kuang

Welcome Back, Booklovers! Babel is one of the most talked about books of the year and I was able to secure an arc from Harper Voyager in exchange for an honest review. It's not my usual type of story but literary stories often surprise me so I went in with an open mind. So keep reading if you're interested in how I felt about this book.

Babel truly could've been a great read but unfortunately R. F. Kuang spends almost 60% of the book following the same mundane formula to remind readers of the themes. She heavily relies on telling rather than showing and the plot suffers because of it.  

Was this book her dissertation? Because it certainly felt like that. Paragraphs upon paragraphs in every chapter are wasted on the most mundane parts of school life. I've never read a novel before that gave you the play by play of lectures. And it didn't even do so in a way that moved along the plot. To be honest it's hard to explain the plot because it never had a clear direction. 

These characters never felt like fleshed out characters and there were so many missed opportunities for this story to have impact through them. Robin Swift is taken away to England as a boy by a white man he discovers is his father, Professor Lovell. Robin soon becomes acustomed to the British way of life and begins studying classical languages before he eventually goes on to study at Oxford. Professor Lovell and Robin had an interesting dynamic however when she finally shifted her attention back to their relationship it was far too late. Robin meets a group of friends but rather than seeing their dynamic together the focus is more on what they're learning in classes and they never feel fleshed out beyond their one main trait. We're told they're becoming close as a group but never witnessing it despite enough page space.

Then there were the footnotes that made this story feel like a textbook. So many footnotes were essentially just so your aware this racist thing happened in history. Or a paragraph explaining who a historical figure was that was mentioned. Or a paragraph telling us that something a character doesn't know and will never find out.

She does hit two of my bookish pet peeves. The first one is using words that don't match the time period in a historical fiction is one of them. Several times when the story did manage to engage me I found myself being pulled out of the text because the dialogue sounded too modern or they used a word I definitely knew originated after 1828. For a book so heavily focused on language it's an unforgiveable offense. The second one is featuring non English language words and giving us the meaning     right after instead of having readers use their context clues to figure it out. The book literally would give out the textbook definition after mentioning a word. And if felt like unnecessary filler.  

This book did not need 500+ pages to tell us what we already known which is that the British Empire was/is racist, biracial people struggle finding where they fit into society with both their white and non white counterparts, racism plays a major role in academy, it's easy to become caught up in fitting into white society despite knowing it's racist because you just want a space to fit in. I get it. She really loves etymology and she really loves Oxford despite it's misgivings. But I needed her to actually explore the themes in a more interesting way.  If a book is going to have very little plot than the character work needs to be on point to give an emotional connection.

The fantasy aspect was mentioned but never really explored in a way that made this actually feel like a fantasy story. Somehow this book even manages to make secret societies and planning a revolution boring.

The audiobook at least makes the book more digestible and tolerable but great narration can't make up for it's misgivings. The actual focus on the story and plot came far too late for me to fully invest and feel satisfied by the outcome.