Babel by RF Kuang review an ingenious fantasy about empire

Translation is the key to magic, as Kuang uses her genre to sharpen a historical investigation into colonisation, learning and power

Welcome to Babel: the great Oxford translation institute in an alternative version of Victorian England, where translators hold the keys to the British empire. Every device and engineering technique there is, from steam trains to the foundations of buildings, relies on silver bars enchanted with “match pairs”; words in two different languages that mean similar things, but with a significant gap between them. The bars create the effect of the difference: feelings, noises, speed, stability, colour, even death. The magic comes from “that sublime, unnameable place where meaning [is] created”.

Bright children are taken from all corners of the empire, fluent in Chinese or Arabic, raised in England, and put to work at Babel to translate, thus finding new match pairs and making new magic – only ever used for the benefit of the rich in London, and to the detriment of those the translators must leave behind in their colonised homelands. We follow Robin Swift from his earliest childhood in China, through his time at Babel, and from his hope that translation is a way to bring people together, to the terrible realisation that, in this colonial framework, “an act of translation is an act of betrayal”.

If it sounds complicated, that’s because it is. This is a scholarly book by a superb scholar – Kuang is a translator herself. The pages are heavy with footnotes; not the more usual whimsical ones, in the style of Susanna Clarke or Terry Pratchett, but academic notes, hectoring and preachy in a parody of the 19th-century tomes Swift and his friends at Oxford must study. The characters’ conversation flies from theories of translation to quotations from Sanskrit, from Dryden to the authors of the Shijing; they are pretentious, but vulnerable too, and the balance is lovely.

The fantastical elements underpin real history, rather than alter it; silver magic is what makes everything happen, and the grandest event it causes here – the fulcrum on which the novel turns – is the first opium war. The British empire is endlessly hungry for more silver and, in order to get it, becomes a huge drugs cartel, growing poppies in India and forcing China to buy opium. The young Babel translators become hopelessly tangled in the problem of whether to serve the corrupt institute that has given them opportunity and education, or their own people. This is not at all a far cry from Kuang’s acclaimed Poppy War trilogy, based on 20th-century Chinese history, and so fans will be in familiar territory.

Even against a whole background of clever things, the triumph here is the narrator. Swift is a complicated man. Born into poverty in China but raised by a wealthy father in England, he embodies all kinds of contradictions. On one hand, he’s an overprivileged, middle-class Hamletty brat whose headaches are always worse than anyone else’s. It comes as a revelation to him that working-class people have a hard time, because he doesn’t know any. But he is also brave, and noble, and endlessly willing to have his worst side policed by his friends. He’s a little boy who decides that his father’s housekeeper’s scones are “the Platonic ideal of bread”. He’s a naive student so shocked by the unfairness of the world behind all his money and his university that he struggles to see how to live in it. Like a set of dangerous silver match pairs, these contradictions can never quite translate each other, and they have explosive results.

This is a grim and harrowing novel; many of the characters have poisonous opinions about race, and Swift becomes increasingly embittered. The antagonists are closer to demons than humans, with no nuance, and they do sickening things. Often the allure of fantasy is escape from the real world, but there’s no escape here; Kuang’s use of the genre does not soften real history but sharpens it. Babel asks what people from colonised countries are supposed to do when they reach positions of power – while being set in a time and place where reaching those positions would, in the real world, have been impossible. It is a fantastically made work, moving and enraging by turns, with an ending to blow down walls.

Babel by RF Kuang is published by Harper Voyager (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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