A friend of mine urgently recommended R.F. Kuang’s Babel a little while ago, and I get the appeal and the recommendation. It’s a throwback to the halcyon days we shared as Indo-European historical linguistics nerds, and it has all of these callbacks to lots of things we were into at the time. (William Jones! Silvestre de Sacy!) And the book very eventually gathers momentum– to spoil things very slightly– with a fantasia of ill-advised violence and destruction.
The earlier parts of the book are well done, but felt a bit too sedate for my taste. One of the pleasures of books like Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula series– or, even better, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell– is getting to explore a world where things are untethered from historical reality; and a world where scholars engrave silver bars with often vague magical powers instead of simply writing historical monographs feels a bit… attenuated?
More substantially, I found the book’s politics overly neat. Imperial language study, per Kuang, is inextricably bound up with imperial projects– fine, no objection there– but the villains of the book are often cartoonishly evil, doing meticulous philological research during the day and deviously plotting imperial villainy on the side. It’s just a little dumb?
I’m no huge fan of Edward Said, but one of the things that makes Orientalism a compelling text is that it takes seriously both the pleasures and perils of Orientalist texts. Said’s serious engagement with, say, Edward William Lane, makes his argument richer and more compelling– precisely because it isn’t a caricature. Babel, to my mind, feels flat in comparison with Orientalism because of the simplicity of its picture of the world. Babel isn’t alone in this; the novels of Becky Chambers, for example, feel overly pat to me in a way that undercuts their qualities.