Those who know me well know that I’ve been recommending R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface and Babel, or, The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of The Oxford Translators’ Revolution every chance I get. I haven’t gotten into The Poppy Wars series yet, if only because I am trying to vary my reading list and give equal reading time to fiction and non-fiction works (there is a universe where this is possible, I believe it).
R. F. Kuang is clearly a wunderkind. She’s a Marshall scholar, holds an MPhil from Cambridge and an MSc from Oxford, and has published six highly successful books, several of which are #1 New York Times and Sunday Times bestsellers. Her latest novel, Katabasis, she wrote while pursuing her PhD at Yale. Oh, and did I mention that she’s not even 30 yet?
All this to say, Kuang is well-credentialed both as an author and an academic, and I very much admire her. So when Katabasis was announced, I was excited, even before I knew what it was about. When I learned that Katabasis was a story of a PhD student’s journey through literal hell, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on a copy of the book.
“Set in 1980s England, it narrates two Cambridge PhD students and magicians—both academic rivals—as they journey through Hell to rescue the soul of their professor.”
Synopsis from Kuang’s fandom page
Despite all the anticipation, I have to say, in the end, I did not love this book, as much as I wanted to. Yes, the novel is crammed with literary references, obscure theologies and detailed discussions of logical thought problem sets, but all this is not what made this book hard to enjoy. Babel was similarly dense in its scholarly expositions, but at least all of it felt relevant to the plot. In Katabasis, however, it felt more like Kuang was simply laying out her own intellectual explorations—impressive, but not always in service of the plot.
It wasn’t even that the protagonist, Alice Law, was unlikeable—hellbent (pun unintended?) on finishing her PhD despite the hellish (sorry, they keep coming) conditions of her studies. I can handle unlikeable characters. The narrator of Yellowface was unlikeable too, but her actions and motivations were compelling. Alice Law, by contrast, felt flat. Following her through hell never felt rewarding. Without spoiling anything, the journey struck me as ultimately pointless and even cliché at various points in the novel. And that was the real disappointment: in Babel and Yellowface, I came away shaken, thinking about the ethics of the choices made by the characters, about complicity, about the price we pay for the lives we want to have. With Katabasis, I just came away relieved it was done.
I’m sure many other readers will find much to love in Katabasis. Kuang has said the two main characters were loosely based on her and her husband, which I can imagine makes the book a beautiful love letter for their relationship. For me, though, it read more as an indulgent exercise that lacked the force and resonance of her earlier works, and I’m left tired but hopeful that her next novel will bring back the spark.