R. F. Kuang, Babel (2022)

1. The peculiar properties of colonial space

Fantasy was born in Oxford. There the mathematician Charles Dodgson devised the adventures of Alice underground, the precursor to Alice in Wonderland, as he drifted along the Cherwell on a summer day with a boatload of spellbound children. There Tolkien’s scholarly dreams of accessing the deep past of humankind, and of inventing a new language, converged to generate the book that birthed the genre. There C. S. Lewis conceived the land of Narnia, which helped to change fantasy for children in the wake of the Second World War, transforming it from a treasure-seeker’s playground to a study in resistance to tyranny and a fierce defence of the imagination.[1] There Philip Pullman regenerated children’s fantasy at a time when it seemed to be fizzling out, pitting his fiercely democratic political vision against Lewis’s more conservative religious convictions. Pullman’s anger at what he saw as the betrayals perpetrated by faith paved the way for yet angrier Oxford fantasies. In Helen Marshall’s The Migration (2019), children react to the sense of having been betrayed by their elders, who bequeathed them the climate catastrophe, by undergoing a revolutionary metamorphosis diagnosed by older scientists as a disease. Oxford continues to prove fertile ground for fantasy, but the fantasies it engenders grow darker and more unsettling with each decade.

R. F. Kuang’s Babel (2022) may be the angriest Oxford fantasy yet. Its subtitle – The Necessity of Violence – has a double meaning: the British Empire found violence necessary to achieve its ends, and the book’s protagonists find violence necessary to make themselves heard, both in Oxford and beyond – Oxford here being the intellectual, economic and technological hub of the British Empire. Like Marshall’s novel, Babel has been written by an outsider to the city, one of those North American scholars who pass through the ancient body of the university, injecting the lifeblood of overseas fees and fresh perspectives into its veins. Unlike Marshall, however, Kuang makes her protagonist, Robin Swift, an Oxford undergraduate: a boy from Guangdong (then known as Canton) in the nineteenth century just before the First Opium War broke out between Britain and China. Insinuating Robin into the University system is for her the literary equivalent of smuggling an incendiary bomb into the Bodleian Library, all of whose users must swear ‘not to bring into the Library, or kindle therein, any fire or flame’. As he learns about Oxford he discovers its links with British imperialist aggression, and the flames of his anger mount as that aggression increasingly comes to bear on himself and his friends. Kuang also inserts Robin into British history, along with the Royal Institute of Translation he attends. These insertions strain against the confines of conventional accounts of the heyday of Empire, threatening to bring them tumbling down round the reader’s ears like the mythical tower from which the Institute derives its nickname: Babel, the place of the confounding of tongues.

The explosive nature of Kuang’s novel derives from its fascination with the peculiar properties of colonial space. Colonialism requires the colonial aggressor to nourish certain convictions about themselves and the state they serve: that both represent the pinnacle of human development, and that their acquisition of power over an ever-widening geographical and cultural territory is therefore benevolent, since any land or people subsumed within the colonial Empire’s bounds must necessarily be improved by its subjugation. Such convictions require a drastic shrinkage of perspective, a wilful blotting-out of the rich resources of knowledge, language, art and history contained in each new territorial acquisition; ironically, perhaps, since those resources are an integral part of what makes any territory worth possessing. Such acts of shrinkage, one might imagine, subject the material being compressed to unbearable pressure, which can only be relieved by some sort of explosion, a sudden, violent moment of release. Kuang’s book builds up the sense of pressure as it goes on, in part through the obvious strains it registers between narrative realism and the fantastic, strains that mount incrementally as we read until the culminating detonation, which by the time it comes has been rendered both inevitable and deeply satisfying.

That sense of strain is largely achieved by means of the many compressed spaces the novel contains, locations which seem to hold far more matter than the laws of physics insist they should. One such space is the building that houses the Royal Institute of Translators, the titular Tower of Babel, named after the tower in Genesis which was constructed by Adam’s descendants as a literal stairway to Heaven.[2] As Kuang explains in her preface, she has had to manipulate the map of Oxford in order to fit the Tower in: ‘I’ve warped geography to make space for it’, she tells us, placing the gigantic structure on a non-existent green near the Bodleian Library and the Radcliffe Library (p. 2).[3] The map of Oxford and the diagram of Babel supplied by Nicolette Caven for the novel make the Tower look like a cross between Tom Tower, the totemic building erected by Christopher Wren over the entrance to Christ Church, Oxford, and the biblical Tower of Babel as imagined by the seventeenth-century painter Pieter Breughel the Elder. But as the novel goes on, the interior of Kuang’s Babel seems to expand, acquiring ‘wings’ which cannot logically exist within a circular structure.[4] Each level of the tower seems to need more space than the one below it – though in Caven’s diagram the levels get steadily smaller as you climb the building – culminating in the topmost storey where silver-working and magical experiments take place, these being the raison d’être of the tower itself. The building is, in fact, ‘larger on the inside than on the outside’ (p. 75), having been built that way by the translator-magicians of the Institute, so that it throbs with barely-contained power like an infernal device on the verge of detonation, recalling the unexploded, whispering bomb lodged in the courtyard of an orphanage in Guillermo del Toro’s early movie The Devil’s Backbone (2001).

This disconnect between the tower’s vertically elongated outward appearance and its expansive interior corresponds neatly to the central premise of the novel, which the tower represents: that the act of translation involves far more than translation, embracing treachery, colonialism, physical and mental metamorphosis, and the wholesale warping of the geography of meaning in the process of transferring a term or concept from one language to another. In this book, it’s the British who have most effectively harnessed the multiple functions of translation magic: magic, that is, which depends on the disconnect between a word in one language and its nearest equivalent in another tongue.

That linguistic disconnect – what’s lost in translation – can be converted to power through the medium of silver, itself a substance which, like gold, has accumulated many meanings over time. In the sixteenth century silver became the principal medium for international commerce, with much of the world’s silver finding its way to China, where it formed the basis of the imperial currency. The silver in question started out in the mines of Japan and later in the mines of Bolivia and Mexico, so that the changing chain of supply obediently follows the geography of global imperialism. Silver is also well known to have the highest electrical conductivity of all metals; indeed, it is used as the standard for conductivity, all other metals being measured against it. This property, Kuang suggests, makes it ideal for capturing the quantities of energy that get lost when a word gets translated, while the international importance of silver currency focuses that energy on the highly volatile relations between empires, nations, communities and markets. A bar of silver, then, with a single word inscribed on two of its opposing surfaces, each word in a different language but meaning roughly the same thing, is a space that fairly pulsates with the competing senses, values and histories that have attached themselves over time to its pair of chosen terms, as well as to the medium that interposes itself between them. Kuang’s Tower of Babel is a similar space, resonating (quite literally, as we eventually learn) with the worldwide market for silver, a market driven in the book by silver’s capacity to capture meanings lost in translation and make magic out of them, as nations seek to appropriate each other’s languages for their own ends.

Set against Kuang’s Royal Institute of Translators – the builders of Babel – is an organisation of anti-imperialist activists known as Hermes, Hermes being the Greek god of thieves as well as of messengers, merchants, scholars, tricksters and orators. As the British Empire plots to divert the world’s silver into its own coffers, Hermes’s objective is to steal it from those coffers and redirect it to ‘people, communities, and movements that deserve it’, such as the ‘slave revolts’ and ‘Resistance movements’ that challenge colonial rule (p. 102). Hermes has its headquarters in another building, the Old Library, that seems vastly larger on the inside than on the outside. ‘From the outside,’ Kuang tells us, ‘it looked as if it could contain a single lecture hall at most. Its interior, meanwhile, could have been the ground floor of the Radcliffe Library’ (p. 383). Larger, in fact, since one end of the building has room in it for explosive experiments, like the eighth floor of the Tower of Babel, and so needs to be set well apart from the inflammable material provided by books and bookshelves; this would be hard to achieve in a circular space like the Radcliffe Library’s ground floor. Many of the contents of the Old Library have been transferred from Babel by acts of thievery, and the work that goes on there parallels Babel’s in its concern with translation, but shifts the main focus of its translation activities from the language of the colonialists, English, to other languages, especially those at risk of being stamped out by colonial aggression. The Old Library is concealed from the world by glamour – here a spell that muffles the sounds of the explosive linguistic experiments conducted within its walls – but it is not invisible; as one Hermes operative puts it, the building is ‘hidden in plain sight’ (p. 383). One reason for representing the Old Library as both ‘hidden’ and visible is the fact that it does exactly what Babel does, not in the interests of Empire but of ‘global liberation’ (p. 388), and that it therefore stands for the small but crucial distinctions that separate a colonial translation project from one that aims to benefit all of humanity. Both projects require very similar physical and academic materials and practitioners; it’s the ends to which they are put that differ fundamentally. It’s therefore fatally easy for scholars to miss the moment when they drift into complicity with the acts of violence necessary to sustain an Empire, embracing the fantasy that they are working for all mankind, while ignoring the fact that the power generated by their translations is being used to promote the interests of the ruling classes. And it’s equally easy to miss the moment when one’s perspective readjusts itself again, no longer tacitly accepting the tenets of colonialism but first recognising the perniciousness of those tenets, then actively setting oneself against them. The Old Library’s impossibly large interior emphasizes the size of the Hermes activists’ ambitions, which are as global as Britain’s, while its hiddenness emphasizes the secret processes whereby the mechanisms of colonial power can be reimagined as mechanisms of liberation, despite (or because of) the explosive distortions they entail.

These two competing buildings, both much larger inside than out, invoke a celebrated Oxford fantasy, C. S. Lewis’s The Last Battle (1956), the apocalyptic final instalment of his Narnian chronicles. In Lewis’s narrative, Narnia’s old faith – presented as cheerful and liberating for those who embrace it – finds its adherents forced into hiding by an oppressive new religion, embodied by the monster-god Tashlan, an artificial fusion of the very different deities of Calormen and Narnia, Tash and Aslan. The creation of Tashlan enables the invading Calormene forces to insist that the two gods are in fact the same, so that the conquest of Narnia by the neighbouring Calormen Empire is only natural, as is the introduction of oppressive new laws that restrict the words and actions of indigenous Narnians. At the climax of the novel these Narnians, together with a few well-meaning Calormenes, find themselves rescued from a global apocalypse by stepping through one of the many doors between worlds with which the Chronicles are filled. On the other side they find a larger, more beautiful Narnia, which itself gives access to further Narnias, each larger and more beautiful than the last. The rallying cry for the escaped Narnians becomes ‘further up and further in’, as they run with increasing energy and pleasure through successive landscapes towards the ultimate Narnia, the largest and innermost of all: God’s country, the land of heart’s desire. The disparity between the vehicle and what it contains is reinforced by the fact that the first portal through which the Narnians step into this succession of larger and better Narnias is a stable door, the entrance to a ramshackle building whose humble appearance is deeply at odds with its symbolic function as the birthplace of Christ, the space in which God compressed his infinite self within the confines of a human body. The larger Narnias are contained one within another like the layers of an onion but in reverse, the largest being impossibly located inside all the smaller versions, as God was contained within the impossibly tiny body of his earthly manifestation, the infant Christ. This fantastic paradox lies at the heart of Christianity, and Lewis’s narrative is designed to complement it by providing a space for Heaven as strange and emotionally satisfying as the space of Christ’s incarnation.

At the same time, there is something unsettling about Lewis’s allegorical representation here of Christianity as under siege in his lifetime. Lewis certainly believed that the religion he cherished was in steep decline in the lands he loved, Britain and Ireland; but his decision to imagine that decline in terms of imperial aggression by a brown-skinned people seems deeply ironic, given the aggressive efforts of white-skinned agents of the British Empire to impose that religion on the rest of the world, by conquest or missionary work or both – not least in Lewis’s native country, Ireland. It’s not for nothing that one of the terms imposed on China in the Treaty of Tientsin at the conclusion of the Second Opium War was to legalize British missionary work in the country once and for all. Missionary work was seen as a crucial means of modernizing China, or rather of reshaping the country into a form that would make it receptive to British commerce and British interests; and Kuang is keenly aware of the direct links between religious mission and imperialism. She includes missionaries, convinced of their innate superiority to the indigenous population, as the advance guard of an imperialist invasion in her inaugural trilogy of fantasy novels, which begins with The Poppy War (2018).

Lewis’s stable is larger on the inside than the outside, and the same is true of his imaginary country, Narnia; its internal largeness embodies its adherence to the values of Aslan, who in turn embodies the values of Christianity as Lewis understood them, so that Aslan too is vastly larger on the ‘inside’ than the talking lion whose form he assumes. Kuang’s Old Library, by contrast, is larger on the inside not for symbolic reasons but because it has to be, just as it is hidden because it will be destroyed if the British authorities find it. No space has been made available in the British Empire for the ideas it contains; they are in danger of being lost, like those meanings lost when any language is translated into the language of Empire, English. The Old Library stands, in fact, as a corrective to Lewis’s narrative of Narnian resistance, one anchored in the material reality of British history, as Lewis’s story about an imperialist ‘Middle-Eastern’ invasion of a landscape coded as British is not.

In fact, Kuang’s narrative is as much concerned with the disconnect between fantasy and reality as it is with that between outsides and interiors. Her Author’s Note should alert us to this fact, focusing as it does on the different versions or fantasies of Oxford which its readers may entertain. ‘The trouble with writing an Oxford novel,’ she tells us, ‘is that anyone who has spent time at Oxford will scrutinize your text to determine if your representation of Oxford aligns with their memories of the place’ (p. 1). It is worse, she adds, if you’re an American writing about the place, ‘for what do Americans know about anything?’ (a phrase that holds a world of meaning for anyone who has heard some of Oxford’s British academics or students commenting on tourists or even scholars from the New World). Kuang goes on to point out that the Oxford she portrays in her novel is both imaginary and carefully rooted in the Oxford of the mid-nineteenth century, which differs in certain crucial respects from the Oxford of any living reader’s memory. She is also well aware that she has modified 1830s Oxford in the light of her own Oxford experience, so that the ‘commemoration ball’ she describes in the novel ‘looks a lot more like a contemporary Oxbridge May/Commemoration Ball than any kind of early-Victorian social event’ (p. 2). The place she depicts is specifically Kuang’s version of Oxford, drawing on her memories; but these prefatory statements are also designed to refute any suggestion that there is some kind of ‘authentic’ Oxford to which British people of the ruling classes alone have access. Indeed, such ‘authentic’ Oxfords are themselves based on a pernicious fantasy, that of Oxford as a place of disinterested or objective learning, serenely untroubled by the British colonial heritage. This fantasy has lately been shaken by the quest to understand, acknowledge and seek reparation for the close ties between British universities and the Atlantic slave trade, and one of Kuang’s characters, Victoire, has herself experienced enslavement – albeit in an unacknowledged form, as ‘a twilight condition, the rules unwritten but implied’ (p. 540).[5] Tolkien’s and Lewis’s fantasies coexist with colonial fantasies of a far more damaging sort, not least the fantasy that philology – the history of languages – can be used to prove the racial superiority of white-skinned ‘races’ over all others. Tolkien did not himself adhere to this philosophy, but he was aware of it, and the hierarchy of white and dark-skinned races in The Lord of the Rings – as well as of their languages – tends to reinforce rather than undermine the racist narrative.

For Kuang, Oxford is itself the most dangerous of fantasies: one that is deeply attractive to lovers of learning, history, fiction and beautiful architecture, but which also sustains the myths that enable imperialist aggression. Three of her central characters, students from non-British cultures who find their way by unusual paths to its hallowed halls, start out by being seduced by the city’s attractions, and continue to be half seduced by them long after they have begun to understand the culture of violence that underpins its institutions. Robin Swift, the boy from Guangdong, learns from his British foster-father at an early age to think of Oxford as ‘the loveliest place on earth’, the ‘centre of all knowledge and innovation in the civilized world’ (p. 25).[6] On first arriving in the city he finds its magic all-pervasive, from the Radcliffe Library, which ‘somehow appeared even larger and grander from the inside than from the outside’ (p. 61), to the nearby Tower of Babel, which he seems not to notice – despite the fact that it’s over three hundred feet tall – until the day when he first steps through its doors, like an adventurer stepping through the ‘door into fairyland’ (p. 74).[7] When he learns from his activist half-brother that ‘It’s violent work that sustains the [Oxford] fantasy’ (p. 138), Robin goes on wanting to believe there is room in the city for outsiders like himself and his friends, who struggle to ‘[carve] their own pockets into it, spaces where they were not just tolerated but thrived’ (p. 171), despite the increasingly unguarded racism of their fellow students. At a crucial juncture in Robin’s life – the point at which he finally needs to make a choice between imperialist Babel and revolutionary Hermes – he sees the city as something out of a story for children: ‘it looked like another, parallel Oxford, an Oxford of the faerie realm […] its spires and turrets promising riddles and adventures and a world of abstraction in which one could get lost forever’ (p. 259). And even after he has committed himself to direct action against its values, Robin continues to see it as a delightful ‘dream’ that has been ‘shattered’ by a rude awakening (p. 433), a charming ‘doll’s house’ that offers ‘a twee approximation of the real world for boys who would never have to truly engage with it’ (p. 459), a fairy tale ‘castle’ whose ‘magician’ has been ‘thrown out’ (p. 459), a ‘rotting gingerbread house’ (p. 473). The fantasy of Oxford endures, although by the end of the book it has shrunk to the size of a toy, a figment, a Christmas leftover, dwarfed by the steady growth of Robin’s awareness of the atrocities it accommodates and enables. Those atrocities expand in his consciousness as the narrative unfolds, straining at the fabric of the city as they accumulate until Oxford too is vastly larger on the inside than on the outside, like the Tower of Babel which is its metonymic double.

Set against the Oxford fantasy is the seemingly fantastic possibility of resistance to Empire, of bringing down the Tower and all it stands for; a revolution, in other words, inspired by the 1791 revolution of enslaved people in Haiti. From the beginning, Robin and his friends are aware that the fairy tale appearance of Oxford is an illusion, for all its seductiveness. When Robin first meets Ramy, for instance – his room-mate from Calcutta – Ramy explains that he can only ever find a kind of acceptance from white students by posing as a prince: ‘The English are never going to think I’m posh,’ he tells Robin, ‘but if I fit into their fantasy, then they’ll at least think I’m royalty’ (p. 56, my emphasis). Soon afterwards the two young men are subjected to a racist attack which drives home the fact that they are outsiders, ‘men at Oxford; […] not Oxford men’; but the knowledge proves too painful for them, and they find it ‘so much easier to pretend; to keep spinning the fantasy for as long as they could’ (p. 70, my emphasis). By this time, however, Robin has already met his half-brother Griffin, who works for a secret organization – Hermes – dedicated to promoting opposition to Empire by redistributing the silver of Babel to deserving causes. At first Griffin himself seems somewhat fantastic. His name recalls a character from Alice in Wonderland, the Gryphon, and like his namesake he is both overbearing in his conversation and associated with the stuff of dreams. When Robin first encounters Griffin he sees a Chinese man much like himself, described as his doppelgänger (a key figure in Freud’s theory of the uncanny, itself allied with his lifelong study of dreams and dreaming), who is being hunted by police through the ‘eerie’ maze of the Oxford streets (p. 66). This man desperately tries to make himself vanish from sight with the help of a stolen silver bar, and his eventual success in disappearing – achieved with Robin’s help – means he does not seem entirely real; Robin later recalls the episode as ‘like falling into a dream’ (p. 69), and later still as ‘dreamlike’ (p. 100). When Robin meets Griffin again some days later the sense of unreality persists: ‘“Am I dreaming?”’ he mumbles (p. 96), though his brother scoffs at the misconception (‘“You wish”’, p. 96). Griffin agrees to devise a code to help them communicate in secret, but for Robin the cypher looks at first like ‘nonsense’, the absurd discourse that pervades Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland (p. 123). He learns, however, to decode it; and gradually Griffin and Hermes begin to seem to him as real as Babel. For a while the fantasy of Hermes and the fantasy of Babel compete for Robin’s loyalties; but the colonial fantasy is finally displaced by a fantasy of retribution, based on the idea of destroying the Tower, which ‘took root and grew inside [him], unfurled until it became less a ludicrous fantasy and more a question of logistics, of how and when’ (p. 434, my emphasis). The notion of the revolution taking ‘root’ ingeniously links it to the roots of words, which translators can use to create their magical silver bars, and to the pub – the Twisted Root – in which the brothers first properly make each other’s acquaintance. Some of the pub’s customers are dangerous radicals, a word derived from the Latin radix, meaning root.

As I’ve suggested, the secret society of revolutionary translators, Hermes, and the Old Library where they make their headquarters, could be described as what’s lost, excluded or jettisoned when translation is used to generate magic for colonial purposes. Their existence is an inevitable consequence of the build-up of anger and frustration in the face of British efforts to establish themselves, through the combined agencies of language and silver, as the dominant race, masters of a global Empire on which the sun will never set.[8] Imperialism, like Marx’s capitalism, harbours the seeds of its own destruction, and Kuang’s metaphor for this is the silver bars used by the scholars of Babel to generate power. The power of these bars, Robin’s tutor tells him, ‘lies in words. More specifically, the stuff of language that words are incapable of expressing – the stuff that gets lost when we move between one language and another. The silver catches what is lost and manifests it into being’ (p. 84). On first inspecting one of these bars, Robin thinks it looks far too small to unleash the energy needed to sustain an Empire: ‘Robin frowned, running his finger along the bar. It seemed so small, too innocuous to produce such a profound effect’ (p. 22). The bar’s seeming smallness expresses the fact that the act of translation contains far more than one might think; not only are meanings lost when translating a concept from one language to another, but meanings are also altered as words get transformed (another meaning of the word translation) by the passage of time. The silver bars draw as much on the etymology of the words inscribed on them – the long history of what they once meant, where they came from, the words to which they are closely or distantly related – as on the differences between analogous words in current languages. As a result, each bar can be seen as a teeming crossroads or meeting-point between cultures, customs, experiences, and socio-political systems past and present. To bind it in the service of just one culture at one moment in history is to compress or confine it – in effect, to shrink it – beyond endurance. On the other hand, when a bar is used to express something too large or complex or paradoxical for its limited function as an instrument of translation to sustain, dire consequences follow: it begins to vibrate with increasing violence, and sometimes explodes, with deadly effect. Bars, then, may either be used for creative purposes, to improve the lives of their users, or for wreaking terrible destruction; the analogy with fire or nuclear fission is obvious. They are vastly larger than they look, like the Tower in which they are invested with their magical properties.

The inward vastness of the silver bars is in fact directly connected to the Tower in a number of ways. They were fabricated there, of course; but silver can also interact with other silver within a certain range, causing it either to sustain or to lose its magical potency. This process is known as ‘resonance’, and can be activated with a set of silver rods kept in the ‘southern wing’ of the Tower’s eighth floor (p. 199). The rods are designed to maintain by their very existence the magical efficacy of the silver bars they match; they ‘resonate’ with the bars, even at a distance, just as the pipes of an organ or the bars of a xylophone resonate to produce notes when filled with air or struck. This makes Robin think, when he first sees the rods in the Tower, of another musical analogy:

Looking out over Oxford, Robin had the impression that the whole city was like a finely tuned music box, relying wholly on its silver gears to keep running; and that if the silver ever ran out, if these resonance rods ever collapsed, then the whole of Oxford would stop abruptly in its tracks. The bell towers would go mute, the cabs would halt on the roads, and the townsfolk would freeze in motion on the street, limbs lifted in midair, mouths open in midspeech. (p. 202)

Imagining the effects that would follow if the resonance rods were to be destroyed (the incapacitating of all the magical silver bars that depend on them and the consequent collapse of the silver-based technology that sustains the British Empire) becomes a key component in Hermes’s struggle against colonialism. Their struggle is underpinned by the conviction that even the smallest of objects – a silver rod or silver bar – contains within itself the capacity to enforce or demolish global systems. If bars and rods can be vastly larger and more potent than they look, the same might be said of the small band of young insurgents who seek to wrest them from the hands of their colonial makers.

Silver and translation, then, as tools of Empire, can also generate the forces that topple empires. This becomes obvious when one examines the language used by the bars’ makers – the translators of Babel – to describe their craft. One of Robin’s tutors, the ironically-named Professor Playfair (he likes to ‘play’, but by no means fairly), often describes his special topic, language, in terms that link it with insurrection as well as with empire. The modern translator, Playfair claims, aspires to remain ‘invisible’ to their reader, so that they operate either like an ideology – a set of political coordinates which masquerade as the natural or inevitable state of things – or an insurrectionist, who must keep themselves hidden in the interests of self-protection. The translator, Playfair goes on, must also be in some sense faithless: ‘translators are always being accused of faithlessness’, he declares (p. 152), and later ‘the act of translation is […] necessarily always an act of betrayal’ (p. 155) (note how he shifts with disarming smoothness from a seeming rejection of betrayal to an active embracing of it). The translator’s faithlessness can be manipulated to produce translated texts that either support colonial interests or bolster the narrative of insurrection. If translators choose not to make themselves invisible, by incorporating unfamiliar words or concepts into their translations, they remind the reader of the foreignness of what they are reading – that there are, in fact, other perspectives in the world which must be accounted for (p. 155) – and this could be deemed to support the anticolonial project; hence perhaps the modern tendency among colonial translators to favour ‘invisible’ translations, using terms and concepts already familiar to the target readership, as against conspicuously strange or foreign ones. Again, the presence of people of colour among the scholars of Babel – people like Robin, Ramy and their friend Victoire – makes the otherness of their specialist languages dangerously visible, from the tutor’s point of view; they must therefore be ‘naturalised’ as far as possible, for instance by giving them European names (such as Robin or Victoire), dressing them in academic garb, and hiding them in plain sight among their white colleagues. The translator, Playfair tells the partygoers, ‘dances in shackles’, meaning they are enslaved by the necessity of following the original text they are engaged in translating; but this need not make them slaves of Empire. They can choose to enslave foreign texts, of course, by ‘naturalising’ them as colonial discourse; but they can also choose to rebel, like the insurrectionists of Haiti, by remaining determinedly faithful to the original language and culture, or by choosing to translate texts and terms with anticolonial connotations.

Playfair’s apparently balanced discourse gives the illusion of an unbiased outlook, a truly academic impartiality in the face of the conflicting evidence he puts forward. He seems, that is, to be ‘playing fair’. But underlying all his arguments is the assumption that the translator’s necessary faithlessness must always in the end serve colonial interests. This is partly, of course, because the British Empire has a near monopoly both on silver and on elite translators, the two key components of the translation magic with which it upholds its global concerns. But it is also because betrayal – the definitive property of translation – has always been the most potent weapon of people in power. Kuang has illustrated this concept many times in her fiction, from the multiple betrayals that punctuate the struggle over Nikara in the Poppy War trilogy to the betrayal of an author by her self-proclaimed best friend, accomplished for the sake of fame and fortune, in her prizewinning novel Yellowface (2023).[9] When Playfair offers his students a seeming choice between fidelity to empire and radical rebellion, his aim is to show them that only one of those choices is worth making.

But Playfair’s own arguments also demonstrate the possibility of a very different kind of betrayal: the betrayal of the betrayers, which is not in fact a betrayal at all. Robin, Ramy and Victoria all end up working for the dissident movement Hermes, and could therefore be called ‘traitors’ to Babel, the institution that employs them, pays their wages and instructs them in their craft. But all three are also victims of colonial betrayal, having been recruited by the Empire as translators without possessing all the data they needed to make an informed decision about their futures. All three were born in places that were subject to British colonization, and all three quickly learn that their colonized status means they can never be recognised as equals by their British associates, despite the elaborate rituals by which their equality has been implied: their investment in academic robes, their installation as members of the academic elite, and not least, the fact that a sample of their blood has been stored away in Babel as a security measure alongside the self-evidently indistinguishable blood of their white colleagues. In Babel, too, they quickly learn that they are working against the interests of their own original communities: the people of colonized India, the enslaved workers of the Caribbean, the exploited workers in the treaty ports of China. Betraying the British Empire, they conclude, is the only way in which they can show themselves faithful to their people, and thus relieve themselves of the unbearable pressure of conflicting loyalties that threatens to tear them apart. Betrayal is fidelity, fidelity betrayal, and these paradoxes build up in their minds and bodies to a political explosion as damaging to the superstructure of Empire as the collapse of the Tower of Babel with which the novel comes to a climax.

2. The two faces of Robin Swift

The explosive force of the three translators’ political awakening is rendered more forceful by the fact that, like the silver bars and the buildings in which they are fashioned, their minds and bodies have so much more in them than they seem able to contain. This is especially true of Kuang’s protagonist, Robin Swift. Every aspect of his personality, from his name to his looks to the various things he stands for, embodies the complex state of the colonised subject, and this astonishing complexity – held within the physically unimpressive person of a self-effacing scholar – is what renders him so much larger on the inside than on the surface. His interior size (the number of conflicting concepts and emotions he embodies) only continues to expand as he gets older and begins to learn the full truth of his situation; and the limits of this incremental expansion are marked by two cataclysmic explosions. The first blast takes place at the point when he uses a silver bar to kill his British father; the second takes place when he uses the rods in the Tower of Babel to destroy the headquarters of the Royal Institute of Translators. Robin’s complexity, then, needs analysis, as investigators might analyse the scattered components of an exploded bomb.

Robin’s name is one place to start. The boy from Guangdong is known throughout the book by his English name, the forename given him in early childhood by his English governess, the surname chosen by Robin himself from the books in his father’s library. Hidden behind this English alias is his Chinese name, which remains unspoken throughout the novel, from the first chapter – when the boy Robin starts to say it to his British father, who interrupts him with a dismissive ‘No, that won’t do’ (p. 13) – to the final sentence of the penultimate chapter, when he sees his dead mother smiling at him and saying his name in her native language. Even at this last moment the reader is not told what it is; it remains a secret part of him, either untouched by British colonialism or effectively erased by British colonialism, depending on your point of view. Erasure (or rather, suppression) is the more likely reading. When asked his name at a key moment in the book by the Chinese High Commissioner in Guangdong, Robin replies ‘Robin Swift’ at once, before realising that it had never occurred to him to give the name he was assigned at birth. By the time this realisation dawns on him, he has lost the chance to assert his Chinese identity in his birthplace, China. That identity only returns to him, in fact, at the point of death – a death whose place and time he chooses for himself, in defiance of the best-laid plans of the British Empire.

So much for Robin’s Chinese name. His English name, meanwhile, changes its significations as he grows. His forename is taken from a nursery rhyme recited to him by his English governess: ‘Who killed Cock Robin?’ (p. 13, footnote), a question which acquires new resonance when Robin himself is killed by the collapsing Tower. When Robin meets his Chinese half-brother and gets inducted into the secret world of Hermes, Griffin takes great pleasure in giving his forename a mythical slant by associating it with the medieval outlaw Robin Hood (p. 99). In doing so he allies Robin with the clandestine organization to which Griffin himself belongs, which steals from the rich (i.e. Babel) to give to the poor (i.e. those communities unable to afford silver and the translation magic it enables). Later we learn that the Hermes operatives describe themselves as a ‘hotbed of Robin Hoods’ (p. 385).[10] Robin’s surname, meanwhile, derives from the author of a famous Irish book, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), which satirizes the British colonial project much as Kuang’s does.[11] Swift’s classic is a political satire aimed at adults, though it has often been read by children, most of whom have little idea of its political significance. Robin chooses Swift’s name for himself as a child, with a child’s perspective. At this point he thinks of Britain and its capital as impossible places diminished by distance, like the tiny lands and cities encountered by Gulliver: ‘London existed to him as Lilliput did: a faraway, imaginary, fantasy place where no one looked, dressed, or spoke remotely like him’ (p. 12). The prospect of going to this fantasy London makes him choose the name Swift out of all the many options in his foster father’s study, because Gulliver was, as Robin will be, ‘A stranger in a strange land, who had to learn the local languages if he wished not to die’ (p. 14). Later, as we’ve seen, Robin’s radicalization makes him see Britain and its cities from an adult perspective, as diminutive things: children’s toys and imaginings designed to conceal the violent methods of their makers behind a screen of charming illusion. By this point in the book, adult readers who know about Swift will be aware of another link between Robin and the great Irish satirist: that both pitted themselves against British colonialism while also working to enhance its power (Swift as an ally of the ruling Tory Government, Robin as a scholar of Babel). At the same time, Swift’s Irishness aligns him with the long history of resistance to British colonialism in that country, embodied in Kuang’s novel by the young Irishwoman Cathy O’Nell, a Babel scholar who also works for Hermes. Robin’s two English names, in other words, not only mark him out as a colonised subject of the British Empire, but predict his eventual rising against that Empire, as an insurrectionist who sees the colonial fantasy dwindle in his mind to the size of Lilliput as he sets himself in opposition to it.

Robin’s names, then – English and Chinese – embody his paradoxical situation as both servant and enemy of Empire, making him a zone of conflict whose political implications go well beyond the private and personal. Another place to start with Robin would be with his early family history, which again marks him out from the first as a zone of conflict. The point when Robin loses his Chinese name is the point at which he is handed over to Professor Lovell, a scholar of Babel; and this point has been prepared for by the Professor for many years. It was Lovell who impregnated Robin’s mother and left her to raise him alone in Guangdong. It was Lovell who provided the child with an English governess and plenty of English-language books to ensure he would grow up equally fluent in English and Chinese. It was Lovell who waited patiently for the boy to reach an age when both languages were firmly fixed in his unconscious before coming to claim him. All these actions were carried out with dispassionate efficiency, and without the slightest concern for the wellbeing of Robin’s Chinese mother or for the English governess, ‘Miss Betty’ (p. 5). Both women were no more than tools to an end: to breed a bilingual child whose skills were perfectly suited to the needs of his father, and of his father’s workplace, the Royal Institute of Translators in Oxford. In fact, Robin only really begins to exist for the Professor when the boy has lost both his Chinese family and his Chinese name. Their loss is convenient. Robin realises this when he learns at a later point in the novel that the Professor had the means to save his family from cholera – a silver bar capable of curing all diseases – and that the Professor was even staying near Guangdong when Robin’s mother died, but that he simply neglected to do so. The family, along with the governess who had faithfully fulfilled her function, were sacrificed as surplus to requirements. Robin himself survives as testimony to the real-life impact of scholarly actions; he has been genetically engineered as a servant of Empire, and his future at Babel was plotted before his birth. The shock of discovering how far his life has been predetermined by an unloving father (Professor Lovell’s name here proves ironic, unless we gloss it as ‘Love-ill’) is one of the key factors in Robin’s turn to insurrection.

Robin’s genes, as son of a Chinese mother and an English father, mean that his appearance can be interpreted in different ways, so that he has in effect more than one face. At times he passes as white, as when a visitor to Lovell’s house tells the professor that Robin is the ‘spitting image’ of his British father (p. 31), or when a British official in China refuses to believe that the young man is Chinese (p. 301). At others he is subject to unwelcome attention as a ‘foreigner’ on British soil, as when he travels by coach to Oxford and is asked by an English child if he can see out of his eyes, which (the child claims) look like ‘little slits’ (p. 49). When Robin studies himself in a mirror after being told he resembles Lovell he sees himself for the first time as an ‘alien’: a person of unknown origin, whose brown hair and eyes ‘could have plausibly marked him as either the son of a Portuguese sailor or the heir to the Qing Emperor’ (p. 32). At this point Robin’s paternity is not known to him; but even as a child he knows that the genetic heritage signalled by his looks is something he cannot ask about, something that lies outside the realm of polite conversation, since it implies an extra-marital and interracial union forbidden by British social laws. In this sense, Robin is a person who is effectively lost in translation between the two cultures that shaped him, since the fraught relationship between those cultures cannot safely be given voice. In fact, the eventual voicing of that relationship – which occurs when he meets his half-brother Griffin – signals the moment when the power of resisting his colonially-imposed destiny begins to stir in Robin’s body, leading in the end to his instigation of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution. Robin is a kind of silver bar, whose innate capacity to effect radical change is only realised in the last days of his life.

Robin’s paradoxical double existence as both a willing instrument of Empire and its colonised subject and antagonist comes to the fore in two major acts of translation, one at the beginning, the other two-thirds of the way through the novel. The first of these occurs when Professor Lovell calls on him, as a boy, to act as interpreter between a Chinese labourer and a British sailor on the ship that will carry them from Guangdong to London. The labourer has a valid contract permitting him to work his passage from China to England, but the sailor refuses to let him on board. When Robin approaches, the labourer interprets his face as that of a fellow countryman – ‘the only other Chinese person in sight’ (p. 15) – and turns to him for help in making his case. But Robin already knows enough to be aware that the case is lost. The labourer is being turned away from the ship out of simple racism (the British sailor claims that allowing him on board will spread lice among passengers and crew), and his contract has been rendered null and void by xenophobia. Robin also fears that he himself may well become the target of racism if he takes the labourer’s side, and that if this happens his foster-father may decide to leave him behind in Guangdong as a failed experiment. He therefore tells the labourer simply that ‘Your contract’s no good here’ (p. 16). The statement is not, of course, a true translation of the sailor’s words about spreading lice; it merely sums up the situation without giving any details that might expose its racist roots. It implies a number of things, however, without openly stating them. The very looseness of the translation from the sailor’s English confirms the sailor’s contempt for the Chinese people, which he expresses in linguistic terms: the labourer, he tells Robin, ‘Couldn’t even understand the word bath if I yelled it at him’ (p. 16). The looseness of the translation also confirms the fact that nothing will be done to help the labourer get justice, no matter how diligently Robin works to translate English to Chinese and vice versa; the situation is beyond verbal negotiation. At the same time, a great many meanings are lost in this colonial act of loose translation; and their loss is most vividly realised in the bodily reactions of the two Chinese people at the heart of it.

The labourer’s reaction to Robin’s non-translation is reflected in his face. It’s a face that displays the effects of the brutal working conditions imposed on workers like himself: it is ‘creased and sun-browned, leathered in a way that made him look sixty, though he was likely only in his thirties’, because ‘All lascars [i.e. non-European sailors] aged quickly; the work wrecked their bodies’ (p. 16). When Robin tells him ‘It’s no good’, the same man’s face expresses a range of painful feelings, offering in effect a compressed history of his life:

A thousand emotions worked through that weathered face – indignation, frustration, and finally, resignation. Robin had been afraid the labourer might argue, might fight, but quickly it became clear that for this man, such treatment was nothing new. This had happened before. The labourer turned and made his way down the gangplank, shoving passengers aside as he did. In a few moments he was gone from sight. (pp. 16-17)

The labourer’s body here becomes a site of conflict: between the notion that he has real worth, expressed in the term ‘indignation’, and the fact that this worth has never been acknowledged by anyone else, as expressed in his ‘frustration’; and between the possibilities of verbal or physical resistance (Robin’s fear that he might ‘argue’ or ‘fight’) and his quick recognition of the futility of such actions (‘resignation’). The labourer ends by using his body to convey his anger as best he can, ‘shoving passengers aside’ as he blunders down the gangplank. Compressed into this passage are all the dynamics of colonialism, which threatens to burst out in a one-man insurrection but ends with the most inadequate bodily expression of frustrated rage, the thrusting of hostile bodies aside as the labourer is forced to walk away from a job to which he is legally entitled.

Robin’s body, meanwhile, reacts fiercely to his recognition of his own complicity with the labourer’s humiliation. His initial instincts are to side with his countryman, both because Chinese workers have always been kind to him and because he ‘associated that face with his own kind’ (p. 16). But the force of Professor Lovell’s thumb ‘digging a groove into his collarbone’ reminds him of the power the Englishman has over him, which in turn affects his body (‘it made his knees tremble’, p. 16), while his decision to reject the labourer’s appeal for help affects his body still more. The boy becomes breathless (he ‘could hardly force his words out’, p. 16), and later feels ‘dizzy’ and ‘cold’, which sets his whole frame ‘shaking’ (p. 17). All these physical reactions stem from his consciousness that he represents the sole conduit between the labourer and the men who seek to oppress him: ‘The choice was his. Only he could communicate it to all parties’ (p. 16). It’s an overwhelming burden for a boy of eleven. His situation as the single point of verbal contact between colonialism and the people it exploits means that before he has even made up his mind what to do, ‘Guilt twisted his gut’ (p. 16): guilt for having such power over ‘one of his elders’, and guilt at his all too predictable inability to help that elder. Like a silver bar overloaded with conflicting meanings, he begins to tremble as if on the verge of detonation. From this point on, Robin responds to moments of heightened emotion with similarly powerful corporeal reactions. When Professor Lovell later subjects the young Robin to a vicious beating, the incident is introduced with a phrase we’ve already heard – ‘Robin’s gut twisted with guilt’ (p. 40) – and culminates with Robin struggling as best he can to prevent his tears from ‘burst[ing] forth’ (p. 42). Robin swells to an unbearable inward size when he confronts Lovell with the question of why he sacrificed his mother to cholera: ‘He felt his chest constrict, as if his heart were a caged beast straining to burst out’ (p. 121). When Robin strives to conceal his murder of Professor Lovell at a party he sweats ‘buckets’ (p. 373), and when he shoots the chandelier in Babel’s front hall to signal the start of the translator’s revolution ‘His whole body trembled, flush with […] vicious energy’ (p. 457). At each key staging post of his journey from obedient imperial subject to insurrectionist, Robin’s body strains and increasingly fails to keep the vastness of his feelings contained within its narrow boundaries.[12]

Robin’s second major act of oral translation in the book occurs when he returns after many years to his birthplace, Guangdong in south-eastern China. By this time he is a third-year student at Babel, whose first overseas assignment is to serve as interpreter between the British and the Chinese in a negotiation over trading terms which holds a key place in global history. In our universe, the negotiation served as a prelude to the First Opium War of 1841, a conflict that laid the groundwork for the unequal relations between Britain and China for over a century. In Kuang’s alternative universe, it triggers the translator’s revolution, whose chief objective is to prevent the war from happening. Robin’s role as sole interpreter for the British on this occasion places him at a crucial crossroads in the narratives of both Empires, as well as at a crossroads in his own story, as he struggles to make a final choice between his rival commitments to Babel and Hermes.

By the time the incident occurs, Robin is no longer naïve about what the Empire stands for, but has not yet decided what to do with that awareness. For a while he has worked clandestinely for Hermes, stealing material from Babel to be reused for Hermes’s purposes; but then he took fright and withdrew from his commitment to the anti-colonial movement. For a while after that he worked quietly for Babel, unwilling to sacrifice his safety for what may only be a fantasy of revolution. But it’s his return to Guangdong that makes him realise how far his own story remains bound up with that of the people throughout the world whose lives and livelihoods are being destroyed by the British Empire. His mother and family died from cholera when British magic, of the kind wielded by Lovell, could have saved them; the effects of the disease, as the boy Robin understood them at the time, resemble the workings of an opiate substance: ‘He was still conscious, though he’d sunk into a drowsy, half-dreaming haze. Soon, he knew, he’d fall into a deep sleep and fail to wake up’ (p. 5). On his return, he finds that the site of his old house has become an actual opium den, where addicts linger in a half-dreaming haze until the moment when they sink into death. Opium is Britain’s chief import into China, despite its prohibition by the Chinese government; it was for the right to go on importing it legally that the First and Second Opium Wars were fought. The British Empire, in other words, has the same effect as a global plague, bringing death to whatever territories it touches. As in the case of Robin’s family, the human costs of this deadly commerce are of no interest to the British, since the Chinese are barely human to them. As a Chinese man, then, Robin himself is barely human to his British masters; it is only by becoming physically, linguistically and morally indistinguishable from them – by becoming effectively British, and reneging his family, language and culture – that he can attain humanity in their eyes. His experiences in Guangdong, as a child and an adult, confirm for him once and for all that the price of being recognised as human by the British is not worth paying.

This recognition comes to him before he begins his work as interpreter between the British and the Chinese. It is marked, among other things, by his new awareness of Gulliver’s Travels as an anti-colonial text. Whereas in childhood he knew Swift’s satire mainly from its first Book – the story of the miniature kingdoms of Lilliput and Blefuscu – by now the part that most resonates with him is Book 4, in which Gulliver becomes the willing accomplice of a species that regards humanity as less than beasts. ‘[T]here’s this chapter,’ he explains to Ramy,

where Gulliver winds up on a land ruled by horses, who call themselves the Houyhnhnms, and where the humans are savage, idiot slaves called Yahoos. […] Gulliver gets so used to living with his Houyhnhnm master, gets so convinced of Houyhnhnm superiority, that when he gets home, he’s horrified by his fellow humans. He thinks they’re imbeciles. He can’t stand to be around them. And that’s how this… that’s…’ Robin rocked back and forth over the bridge. He felt like no matter how hard he breathed, he could not get enough air. (p. 309)

Robin’s summary of the story here is a deeply personal one. In Swift’s satire, the talking horses can be read, from one point of view, as idealised beings, whose pacific good government distinguishes them from the violent and insanitary tendencies of the Yahoos they enslave. From an anti-colonial perspective, however, they can be read as being as bad as the Yahoos, given their willingness to enslave and kill another species for their benefit. Robin’s interpretation of Book 4 marks one of the many points in his narrative when he undergoes a momentous shift in his point of view. He has till now, he realises, been reading things from his ‘master’s’ perspective – the perspective of the British Empire – and so has looked down on anyone from beyond its boundaries, or anyone who is powerless within them, as his inferiors. But there are many perspectives on or interpretations of things, and the human world is vastly larger, richer and more complex than the British would have it appear. This comes home to him again when he becomes for the second time an interpreter between the British and the Chinese; that is, between the perspectives of rival empires, one of which is intent on colonizing the other.

This second act of interpretation builds directly on the first. Robin finds himself striving to convey the words of an English merchant, Mr Baylis, to the Chinese High Commissioner, Lin Zexu, as the former seeks to insist that the latter permit British companies to sell opium freely in China, in defiance of Chinese law. Once again, the conversation Robin is assigned to translate is a largely pointless one, because Mr Baylis’s argument has already been made in advance in official letters to the High Commissioner, and also because Lin can only repeat words already uttered by the Daoguang Emperor: ‘I will reiterate to you,’ he tells Baylis, ‘what we wrote to your Queen Victoria, […] that any foreigners bringing opium into China with designs to sell it will be decapitated’ (p. 311). The translation process is therefore unnecessary, as it was in the case of the labourer. The British cannot listen to the Chinese because they see them as mere animals; the Chinese cannot listen to the British because they see them as utterly devoid of reason. When invited by the Chinese High Commissioner to speak to him in private, Robin once again finds himself forced to gloss the words he has uttered on behalf of the British, just as he did when speaking to the labourer. This time, however, he glosses them with a raw statement of the truth as he now sees it. Whereas the young Robin chose to state a truth which avoided highlighting the racism of the British – ‘Your contract’s no good here’ – the older Robin identifies racism as the crux of the matter. When asked by Lin whether, in his view, it’s worth prolonging negotiations with the British in pursuit of compromise, Robin answers: ‘No […]. They want what they want, and they won’t settle for anything less. They don’t respect you, or your government. You are obstacles to be resolved, one way or another’ (p. 314). ‘Disappointing,’ Lin replies, ‘For all their talk of rights and dignity’; and Robin responds, ‘I think those principles only apply to those they find human.’ This second substitution of a gloss for a direct translation exposes one kind of meaning that always gets lost in any attempt to render the words of one language in the words of another: the rooted prejudices that prevent a person from hearing anything spoken by someone they despise. Robin’s second act of interpretation, in other words, makes up for his failure to call out racism in his childhood by casting its shadow over all exchanges between the British Empire and the many people in the world it defines as ‘uncivilised’.

Inevitably, Robin’s translation of the facts for the benefit of Lin is glossed as betrayal by the British Empire he was born to serve. His father, Professor Lovell, rushes at him afterwards and asks, ‘What did you say? […] What did you tell him?’ while shaking him violently by the collar (p. 315). Lovell’s reaction merely confirms the accuracy of Robin’s words to Lin about the attitude of the British Empire to non-British peoples: for men like Lovell they are less than human, and hence to be addressed with violence rather than reason. Lovell’s questions are accompanied by a facial expression that confirms the professor’s own lapse into (or existence in) an irrational, ‘nonhuman’ condition – ‘the look in his eyes was beastly, wholly unrecognizable’ – so that his face can no longer be read as linking him to Robin. Remember, by contrast, how the faces of Robin and the labourer were interpreted by each as having a familial resemblance, and how Robin was able to read the labourer’s life story in his expression. The implied breakdown of relations between Lovell and Robin refutes at a blow Lovell’s characterization of his son as a traitor, since it also implies there is no familial link between them; they are effectively strangers to one another. Lin, meanwhile, responds to Robin’s blunt articulation of the facts – that is, of the unreasoning ‘beastliness’ of the British imperialists – by engaging in a retaliatory act of violence: he has his troops set fire to a cargo of British opium in Guangdong harbour. Between beast-like peoples – or rather, between one people and another that regards the first as beasts, while itself behaving with an irrationality which can be construed as bestial – there can be no conversation, merely sudden explosive bursts of fierce aggression.

Professor Lovell’s attack on Robin, itself prompted by Lin’s attack on British opium-carrying vessels, leads directly to Robin’s fatal attack on his father. On the return journey to England father and son confront each other in Lovell’s cabin, in an encounter that has been ‘a long time coming’ (p. 318), and so brings to a catastrophic head the slow build-up of pressure in Robin’s body, which has expressed itself so far in bodily symptoms: nausea, the twisting of guts, uncontrollable shaking. The encounter involves another act of interpretation or translation, as Lovell seeks to force from his son a confession of the ‘truth’ of what he said to Lin. He is not interested in hearing Robin’s assurances that ‘what happened at the docks wasn’t because of me’ (p. 319); instead he insists that the boy ‘For once […] try to simply say what you mean’ [my emphasis]. The words Robin spoke to Lin, it seems, are not at issue; instead the professor seeks access to what Robin has never expressed, to the meanings that have so far been lost in translation between father and son. These include Robin’s disgust at the British opium trade, his refusal to be its instrument in future, his recognition that he himself has been exploited all his life, and his understanding that he can never be fully a person in his father’s eyes, since ‘personhood demand[s] the blood purity of the European man’, whereas Robin is an ‘impure’ fusion of disparate elements (p. 321).

It’s at this point that Robin decides he can no longer exist as the double or multiple person he has been since childhood:

He had become so good at holding two truths in his head at once. That he was an Englishman and not. That Professor Lovell was his father and not. That the Chinese were a stupid, backwards people, and that he was also one of them. That he hated Babel, and wanted to live forever in its embrace. He had danced for years on the razor’s edge of these truths, had remained there as a means of survival, a way to cope, unable to accept either side fully because an unflinching examination of the truth was so frightening that the contradictions threatened to break him. (p. 321)

But he cannot go on like this, he concludes, existing as a ‘split man’ riven by contradictions; ‘He felt a great pressure in the back of his mind’, as if ‘he would quite literally burst, unless he stopped being double’. He must choose a side, thus ending his status as the unstable zone between incompatible elements, a silver bar at risk of imminent detonation.

The choice is made easier, again, by a face; in this case his father’s face, which suddenly adopts ‘the ugliest expression he had ever seen [it] wear’, with bulging eyes and bared teeth, ‘as if a mask of civility had been stripped away’ (p. 322). It’s made easier, too, by his father’s description of the experiment to make Robin the perfect linguist as an exercise in translation (p. 321) – a piece of academic research unaffected by the human costs it entails – and by Lovell’s refusal to say Robin’s mother’s name when Robin asks him to, so that she becomes yet another thing lost in translation, yet another person sacrificed in the interest of subjecting the Chinese people and their language to British control (p. 322). This second loss of a name ignites a burst of anger in Robin’s body, and even as it does so Robin thinks about the origins of the word anger in Old Icelandic, where it’s ‘tied closely to physical suffering’ and sums up how the emotion ‘simmer[s], then explode[s]’ from the human frame (p. 323). Robin kills his father with a silver bar bearing the word ‘Bào’ and its English translation, ‘to explode, to burst forth with what could no longer be contained’ (p. 324). The instrument of the killing perfectly embodies Robin’s emotions at that moment; and its force, with all its catastrophic consequences – an explosive chain reaction that leads inexorably to the translators’ revolution – derives directly from the many contradictory elements that have gone into these emotions.

Afterwards, Robin seeks to gloss his catastrophic action as an act of self-defence, in another attempted act of translation. He tells himself that he thought his father was reaching for a weapon at the point when he hurled the bar, or that Robin himself was in the grip of an unthinking impulse, or that he did not know what the bar would do to his father when it struck him. But in the end he cannot accept his own translation of the facts into something palatable. He knew exactly what he was doing when he killed his father, because translation magic does not work unless the practitioner holds in his mind the exact meaning of the words engraved on either face of the silver bar. His rejection of his own attempts to translate murder into accident or justifiable homicide confirms his commitment to a singular position, that of an active antagonist to colonialism and its willing human instruments. From this time onward he is no longer a ‘split man’, though his body continues to resonate with the accumulated contradictions that brought him into being. Robin Swift, in other words, no longer has two faces.

3. The many families of Robin Swift

The death of Professor Lovell marks the end of Robin’s connection to his father’s family. Not that his father was ever really family to him, since he was more notable for his absence – physical or emotional – than for his presence. Robin is, however, blessed or cursed with many other families, which is part of what makes him so much larger than he appears, since each family brings with it a different set of attachments and obligations, loyalties and potential avenues to betrayal. Indeed, every family group to which Robin becomes affiliated finds itself betrayed, in one way or another, often enough by Robin himself. Robin’s hostility to his father, for instance, was ignited by the Professor’s betrayal of his family in Guangdong; though Robin’s own failure to remember his Chinese name suggests that he too betrays his Chinese family, or rather their memory, by committing himself body and soul (for a while) to the man who betrayed them. Lovell also betrays his son Robin, first by failing to tell him about his other Chinese family – the family among whom his half-brother Griffin was raised – then by refusing to acknowledge the fact that he is Robin’s father, and finally by concealing his secret marriage to an Englishwoman in Yorkshire, by whom he has fathered two more children: ‘A girl and a boy, seven and three,’ as Griffin explains, ‘Darling Philippa and little Dick’ (p. 95). Robin’s birth family, in other words, is vastly larger and more diverse than the conventional nuclear family which has come to dominate familial myths since the early days of the industrial revolution.

Then there are Robin’s families-by-association, Babel and Hermes. On his arrival at Oxford, Robin is embraced as an ersatz family member by the Royal Institute of Translators at Babel, whose objective, as Professor Playfair sees it, is ‘to make the other familiar’ (p. 83) – that is, to adopt strange languages, along with their territories, into the British family. (‘Familial’ is the more obvious adjective for this, while ‘familiar’ can have undertones of contempt.) Babel, Playfair tells the new students from distant lands, is to become their home,[13] and he cements the associated feeling of kinship and safety with the help of a silver bar, which has the German word ‘heimlich’ (i.e. secret) inscribed on one side and the English word ‘clandestine’ inscribed on the other. The magic of this bar is to make the students of Babel feel safe and private in the Tower of Babel – to feel completely at home – since what’s lost in translation between the two terms is the other meaning of ‘heimlich’, which is ‘homely’, derived from Heim or home. There are of course secrets in families, however, as Professor Lovell’s example makes plain. The secret of Babel is that its apparently egalitarian treatment of its colonized members conceals the fact that they are really servants or slaves; their translations are used for the exclusive benefit of their masters, the British with their Empire, and if they deviate from this objective they will be promptly ejected from the family circle. Slaves, of course, were subsidiary ‘members’ of Roman families, and a crucial component of the ancient Roman imperial machine to which the British liked to compare their own colonial venture. Their blood oiled the pistons of Roman society, so to speak; and in much the same way, Babel depends on the blood of its staff and students. Their relationship with the Tower is literally cemented in blood, in fact, since vials of blood are extracted from Babel’s workers and kept in storage under the building as a means of protecting it from unwelcome intruders. Only Babel staff and students can pass unharmed through the Tower’s front door, which is guarded by spells designed to unleash a barrage of deadly missiles on unwary visitors – that is, on people whose blood the building does not acknowledge as its own. Professor Playfair, who devises these spells, assures his students as he takes their blood that ‘Now you’re part of the tower’ and that ‘now the tower knows you’ (p. 86). This confirms them as Babel insiders, but also binds them bodily to the Institute, so that they are as much in its power as a child is in the power of its parents or guardians. A Babel student can as easily be cut off from the Institute (by destroying their vial) as Professor Lovell’s children can be cut off if they prove unsuitable for his purposes. No wonder Ramy describes the concept of being ‘known’ by the Tower as ‘a bit creepy’ (p. 86).

Hermes too represents itself as a global family, but one that is vastly more inclusive than its imperial counterpart. Robin’s arrival in the Old Library feels like a sudden extension of his family circle, since the building resembles a smaller Babel while its inhabitants embrace the mutual acceptance, international outlook and pleasure in sharing knowledge enjoyed by Robin and his three best friends. The revolutionaries of Hermes discuss how to extend the family circle still further by convincing other victims of British imperialism to recognise what they have in common. ‘The point is to build a [global] coalition,’ the conspirator Anthony explains to Robin (p. 405), and this is made possible by the similar problems faced by families across the world: ‘The fate of a poor family in [Guangdong] is in fact intricately linked to the fate of an out-of-work weaver from Yorkshire’ (p. 406). A model for this coalition is provided by the alliance between the revolutionary translators who seize the Tower of Babel in the final part of the book and the unemployed British workers who barricade the Oxford streets in support of the rising. Those workers were introduced into Kuang’s narrative by way of a family reduced to beggary after the father lost his job, when his labour at a northern factory was rendered redundant by technological advances driven by translation magic. Robin first sees the father as a solitary protestor throwing eggs at the Babel students, face distorted by rage (p. 210); but their next meeting involves a moment of mutual recognition, which shows obvious parallels with Robin’s encounter with the Chinese labourer in Guangdong:

One stormy night […] Robin glimpsed a family sitting at a corner of Woodstock Road holding out tin mugs for alms. […] The two small children gave him little waves as he approached, and the sight of their pale, rain-stroked faces made him feel guilty enough to stop and fish several pennies out of his pocket.

‘Thank you,’ murmured the father. ‘God bless you.’

The man’s beard had grown out, and his clothes had got a good deal tattier, but Robin still recognised him – he was, without question, one of the men who had screamed obscenities at him on his way into the tower several weeks ago. He met Robin’s eyes. It wasn’t clear if he recognised Robin as well[.] (p. 214)

The brief, ambiguous moment of mutual recognition harks back to the time when Robin looked into the labourer’s face and saw in it the story of his life as an itinerant worker. That earlier encounter led to an acrimonious parting. The meeting with the factory worker’s family, by contrast, proves prophetic of Robin’s third and final meeting with the same worker, which takes place at the door of the Tower, now held to ransom by the rebel translators. At this point both men recognise each other unambiguously, and Robin finally learns the man’s name: Abel Goodfellow, his surname recalling the impish goblin Robin Goodfellow from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The fact that they share the forename Robin – or in Abel’s case the shadow or memory of that name – confirms the fact that they are now ‘good fellows’, part of a revolutionary fellowship or family which seeks to extend its branches to exploited workers throughout the world. Their last meeting is in fact a warm one, and ends more warmly still, when Abel shakes Robin’s hand goodbye and says ‘God be with you’, echoing his words on the corner of Woodstock Road many months before (p. 533). Abel’s familial relationship with Robin is never made explicit, but Kuang represents his farewell handshake as the polar opposite of Lovell’s emotional coldness: ‘His grip was so warm [and] solid’ (p. 533). Abel’s implied kinship with the young translator stems not from a bid to get power over him, or to make him a member of some exclusive club, as Lovell’s familial manoeuvring so often was; it arises instead from a mutual understanding of their common interests and shared objectives. It’s egalitarian, supportive, inclusive, and emotionally satisfying, and includes no constraint, no build-up of pressure. Abel and his fellow ‘workmen strikers’ represent the possibility of another kind of relationship between Robin and Britain, a relationship based on solidarity between members of the exploited classes, regardless of ethnicity, who pit themselves against all kinds of oppression (p. 486).

Robin’s relationship with his Babel and Hermes families is reinforced in both cases by other family ties. He is tied to Babel, of course, by his father, for whom (as for Professor Playfair) the Tower is ‘the most wonderful place on earth’ (p. 82). He is also tied to it by his chosen family, the three Babel students he meets in his earliest days at Oxford, Ramy, Victoire and Letty. He warms to all three at once, and at one key moment abruptly realizes what they mean to him, sensing it in his body’s core, where (as we’ve seen) he senses all his most powerful emotions:

He blinked, because he’d just registered what this most mundane and extraordinary moment meant – that in the space of several weeks, they had become what he’d never found in Hampstead [i.e. in Professor Lovell’s household], what he thought he’d never have again after [Guangdong]: a circle of people he loved so fiercely his chest hurt when he thought of them.

A family. (p. 132)

By the time this recognition dawns, however, he has already been introduced to the Hermes family, by way of another family tie: his half-brother Griffin. Griffin is Robin’s doppelgänger, his other self. They look the same, owing to their shared paternity: Griffin, it emerges, is the product of an earlier experiment by Lovell, who sought to father a child bilingual in Chinese and English but took Griffin away from his family too young, before the Chinese language became fully engrained in his body and mind. The half-brothers spot the physical resemblance between them before ever they know of their blood ties. They also share the same early history, the same education, even the same passions or desires: Robin harbours an unspoken attraction to Ramy, which arouses the jealousy of their friend Letty, while Griffin, it emerges, was at the centre of a similar love triangle with his friends Evie Brooke and Sterling Jones. Both love triangles culminate in death: Letty shoots Ramy in the Old Library, Griffin kills Evie in Babel, and Griffin and Sterling kill each other in the grounds of Oxford Castle. Even Robin’s own death springs directly from his loss of Ramy, which leaves him willing to sacrifice his life for the revolution. After Griffin’s death, in fact, the two young men seem to merge into one. Robin loses his tentativeness, the resistance to violence that led him to turn against Hermes for a time, and ‘channels’ his dead half-brother at the insurrection, taking on his persona as he and Victoire seize control of Babel: ‘He forced his voice to grow, to take up more space in the room than he ever had’ (p. 451). By this time he and his brother are no longer separate entities, one older and more knowledgeable than the other, one more committed to the cause than his weaker sibling, one so much larger than the other in charisma and outlook that Robin must physically ‘grow’ in order to achieve an equal stature. There is no longer any need for translation between them, that is, of explanations of each other’s political and personal positions. In this scene Robin’s growth reaches maximum capacity, and he finds himself at last large enough to accommodate the many disparate elements that comprise both his and Griffin’s complicated, dangerous inner lives.

Woven through Robin’s family ties are the betrayals he commits against his many families. He betrays Babel when he agrees to work for Hermes, and he betrays the other members of his chosen family, Ramy, Victoire and Letty, when he fails to let them in on the secret. He betrays Hermes when he is exposed by Babel as a Hermes operative, and chooses to give up the location of one of their safe houses in exchange for his freedom to continue as a Babel student. He betrays his Chinese family by working as an interpreter for the British Empire, which first failed to protect them from cholera and now seeks to control their country through the disease of addiction. He betrays his father’s family in reaction to his father’s repeated betrayals of Robin himself. In many cases he goes on to atone for these betrayals, for instance by saving Ramy and Victoire’s lives when they are caught in one of Playfair’s traps, or by telling the truth about the British to the Chinese High Commissioner, or by leading the translator’s revolution against the Tower whose forces massacred his friends at Hermes. On the other hand, he also atones for his betrayal of Babel by putting an end to his work for Hermes, and later by informing on the secret organization. He reconciles with his father, for a short time, by consenting to work with him in China. His final commitment to Hermes is read as treachery by his friend Letty. Each betrayal also constitutes an act of loyalty, each act of loyalty constitutes a betrayal, and it’s on the basis of these contradictions, Kuang implies, that British imperialism retains its grip on its colonised subjects.

In the closing stages of the book, the concepts of familial loyalty and betrayal come under intense scrutiny. Alone and on the run after the destruction of the Old Library and the massacre of its insurrectionist community, Robin and Victoire find their way to a Hermes safe house where they send out a signal in the form of a beacon to potential allies, using the magic of a silver bar they find there. Later, when they have captured Babel with a small band of fellow translators, they send out another flock of messages, this time written on sheets of paper made to fly across the city of Oxford by another spell. By this time all their family groups have been destroyed, and their quest for a new community looks bleak; as they light their magical beacon in the safe house, an exhausted Robin remarks ‘I don’t know if anyone’s even listening’ (p. 448), while the translator-insurrectionists in the Tower conceal from one another the same anxiety: ‘They were all suffering from […] a creeping dread that this strike might do nothing but damn themselves, and that their cries would go unheard into the night’ (p. 467). On both occasions, however, their calls for help are answered. When they enter the Tower of Babel in the hope of seizing it – two students against an imperial institution – they are soon joined by a little group of like-minded translators, which include Professor Chakravarti, the one person in Britain who seems to have spotted their beacon. Their flying paper messages bring them the support of the British labourers led by Abel Goodfellow, who brings one of the messages with him when he joins them in the Tower. As the taking of the Tower turns into a siege, with the translators on the inside and the British imperial forces on the outside, it gradually emerges that the cause of the translators is a universal one among the working population of the world – more universal, indeed, than the translators themselves had suspected. Abel points out that the striking workers of Britain have been trying to draw attention to affinities between their cause and the cause of the translators for many years – the translators, ironically, had simply failed to understand their language (working-class suffering, the insurrectionist Professor Craft confesses, is ‘a side of the story we don’t often think about, isn’t it?’, p. 495). For all its positive implications, the word ‘family’ also implies an outside: people who don’t belong to the intimate network of friends, protectors, lovers and comrades which identify any family group as residing inside a set of self-made defences or barriers. Abel Goodfellow and his striking workers set up barricades outside the Tower to protect the translators from the British army, but their barricades represent not exclusiveness but ‘solidarity’ (p. 486), a solidarity that implicitly extends itself to all who work for powerful and contemptuous bosses. This worldwide solidarity with the oppressed can hardly be adequately identified as a familial relationship, since there is no nation or population whose members are exempt from it.

The inclusiveness of solidarity exposes the limitations of the family concept. Families invariably involve constraints and obligations which can feel imprisoning. There can be no family without people who are defined as not family – strangers, enemies, aliens, others. The terms ‘treason’, ’treachery’ and ‘betrayal’, which get wielded against their members so often by the various families and quasi-familial groups to which Robin belongs, imply that there are clearly defined rules in place that cannot be broken without transforming yourself into – or exposing yourself as – a stranger, an enemy, a threat. These rules are invariably put in place by authority figures, frequently paternal or patriarchal, who also interpret them and punish breaches as they see fit. An example of such a patriarchal family is Britain itself, which (as an imperial power) identifies certain people as authentically ‘British’ and others – such as the translators of colour who work for Babel – as not British at all, and as incapable of ever attaining Britishness because they are not bound to Britain by blood. The blood kept in vials by Babel does not count; it is merely a failsafe mechanism, not a genuine statement of inclusion and affection. This is why a diverse group of translators from many countries – including a white woman born and raised in Britain – choose to betray the British family, a betrayal which takes the most damning form of all from an imperialist perspective: ‘treason against the crown’ (p. 466).

In the final sections of the book, by contrast, the rules of the translator’s rebellion are not imposed by some patriarchal authority figures but made up collectively, on the fly, by the translators themselves. The insurrectionists react to their chosen situation – a situation of extreme danger, which culminates in an act of collective self-destruction as they bring down the Tower, along with the rods and bars that sustain the Empire, on their heads – in very different ways: they scatter to different parts of the building, where each considers how to reconcile themselves with their imminent deaths, and in the final seconds of the revolution each speaks the words of magic that bring down the Tower in a separate place, in terrible isolation. They work together, in other words, for the same objective, but they retain their individual self-determination at all times, refusing to be moulded into a homogeneous body responding to orders from above; refuse, that is, to become a patriarchal family. In this way they set up an alternative model of relations within a close-knit group which lives and dies in a single village, building or ‘home’.

As a result, at various points in the revolution disagreements arise among the revolutionaries, and these are sometimes resolved with actions that might in a patriarchal family group be defined as betrayal. Professor Chakravarti, for example, finds that at one stage he cannot condone the level of violence that will be committed against the British population by the translators, as they destroy the magic spells which hold buildings, roads, machines, bridges and other crucial elements of the social infrastructure together. There will be too much collateral destruction, he insists, involving innocents: women and children who have never exercised authority on behalf of the Empire. It is agreed, then, that he must leave the Tower; but he is never accused of betrayal, only of choosing a different path because of his convictions. The same is true of Abel Goodfellow, who supports the revolution for as long as he can but will not stay to be massacred with the rest, since he is relied upon by his family and fellow workers. As we have seen, his parting with Robin, who elects to stay, is warmly affectionate; there is never a hint that Robin feels betrayed by his decision. Finally, Victoire too decides to leave before the other insurrectionists bring the Tower down on themselves, like latter-day Samsons. Her reasoning is that the struggle must continue, and that she refuses to be another victim of Empire, another ‘Dying Negro’ (p. 527), to be spoken and written about with a pity indistinguishable from condescension. ‘I want to live, and thrive, and survive them,’ she tells Robin (p. 527); ‘I want a future’. And in choosing a future she ensures that the translator’s rebellion is larger than itself; that it is not confined to a single point in history, but opens out into a complex web of new movements, communities and imaginative possibilities, extending from the imaginary nineteenth century into the lifetime of Kuang’s readers and beyond. She ensures that a future of resistance, courage, commitment, and self-respect in the face of widespread contempt or hostility, is no mere ‘exercise in fantasy’ (p. 511), as Robin sees it. Her decision to break away from the insurrection, to go beyond it, in other words, is as necessary as the insurrection itself.

Like the rebellion it describes, Kuang’s novel is larger in every way than its dimensions suggest – although these are by no means negligible; it’s a substantial book. Babel insinuates itself into the familiar narrative of history, creating a space for itself where no such space existed before, much as Kuang created a space for the Tower of Babel on the map of Oxford, where there is no real space for such an innovation. The translator-insurrectionists worry that their struggle will be forgotten, that their histories will be ‘erased’ (p. 507). One of their number, Ibrahim, even sets about writing a small account of the revolution, which Abel takes with him when he leaves the Tower. The history is designed as an act of translation, a way of interpreting the designs and desires of the revolutionaries – though Robin remains concerned at its inadequacy when faced with ‘the oppressive wrath of denigrating narrative they fought against’ (p. 507). Kuang’s book contains both Ibrahim’s little history and Robin’s doubts as to its effectiveness, and lends them an emotional resonance which they would never have had outside her story; her readers will find their hearts and minds affected by her words as if by a silver rod or bar, thrumming in harmony with the young rebels they have come to know so well. We carry them with us when we finish reading, as Victoire carried the anti-imperialist struggle beyond the Tower.

Kuang’s angry Oxford novel strains at its own seams. It’s full of footnotes, some of which refer to neglected colonial and anti-colonial episodes in real world history, others to aspects of her own story she has no time to develop – most startlingly, perhaps, the story of the love-triangle involving Griffin and his university friends which came to a violent end with Griffin’s death (p. 431). Footnotes imply a vastly larger world than the one contained within a book’s chosen narrative arc, and the reader who pays attention to Kuang’s footnotes may well find themselves setting out on a journey of exploration that takes them off at a tangent from the story of Robin and his friends: for instance, into a history of the Haitian Revolution or of the First and Second Opium Wars. Kuang’s novel, in other words, enlarges our understanding of history, even as it trades in impossibilities involving the magic of translation. Indeed, it subtly redefines fantasy itself, which is often defined as the literature of impossibility. We are at all times surrounded by impossibilities, Kuang tells us, from the impossibility of  condoning Empire – which many of us nevertheless succeed in achieving – to the impossibility of insurrection, which has also been achieved from time to time. Translation itself has often been driven by fantasies, such as the notion that there was once a universal Adamic language spoken by everyone on earth, and from which all languages can ultimately be derived, as diverse families might claim to be derived from a common ancestor. Translation itself, she adds, is a fantastic impossibility. We can never hope to convey the full meaning of a statement in one language by translating it into another. ‘Language was just difference,’ Robin thinks in the final moments of his life, ‘A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No; a thousand worlds within one. And translation – a necessary endeavour, however futile, to move between them’ (p. 537). Translation may be impossible, but it is necessary; as necessary as the commitment to constant movement, and the constant reaffirmation of solidarity between communities, which set us in opposition to the rules, constraints and prohibitions of Empires past and present, great and small.

NOTES

[1] See Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn, Children’s Fantasy Literature: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), Chapter 5, ‘The Changing Landscape of Post-war Fantasy’.

[2] See Genesis 11, 1-9, especially v. 4: ‘And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven’.

[3] The Radcliffe Library is now known as the Radcliffe Camera.

[4] See p. 199: ‘Back at Babel, Professor Chakravarti led Robin up to the southern wing of the eighth floor’.

[5] Indeed, all four of her main characters – four young translators working for Babel – are associated with slavery, in that they replicate the role of the slaves of the Egyptian king Psammetichus, young Egyptian boys who were brought up to speak fluent Greek so that they could keep an eye on the king’s unreliable Greek allies (pp. 82-3).

[6] His colleague Professor Playfair says something similar about Babel on p. 82: ‘It’s the most wonderful place on earth’.

[7] Robin’s tutor, Professor Playfair, later compares entering the Tower for the first time to ‘taking food in the seelie court’ (p. 82). Traditionally, eating food in the realm of the fairies condemns you to stay with them for ever as their slave.

[8] The close link between Hermes and Babel is neatly summed up by the name of the revolutionary organization. Professor Playfair tells his students that ‘There is indeed something special about silver that makes it an ideal vehicle for what we do. I like to think that it was blessed by the gods – it’s refined with mercury, after all, and Mercury is the messenger god, no? Mercury, Hermes. Does silver then have an inextricable link to hermeneutics?’ (pp. 83-4). Later Griffin explains the reasoning behind the name of the group he works for, the Hermes Society. ‘It’s a joke. Silver and mercury, mercury and Hermes, Hermes and hermeneutics. I don’t know who came up with it. (p. 99). Quite possibly it was the Society’s most implacable enemy, Professor Playfair, who gave its members the idea for the name.

[9] See for example The Burning God (2020), pp. 62-3: ‘She’d laid her loyalty at the feet of two masters before. Each had betrayed her in turn. She’d trusted first [the Empress] Daji and then [the would-be Republican leader] Vaisra, and they’d both sold her away without blinking’.

[10] Robin’s first name also echoes a celebrated British colonial text, Robinson Crusoe (1719). The castaway refers to himself so often as ‘Poor Robin Crusoe’ that his parrot learns the phrase. Kuang’s Robin could be said to be in equal parts the isolated subject of Empire, Robinson himself, and the indigenous man he rescues and makes his servant or slave, Friday. It’s noteworthy that we never learn Friday’s true name, only the name Crusoe gives him.

[11] See in particular Gulliver’s account of the current state of England in Book 4, in which he explains the guiding principles of colonialism: ‘Sometimes our Neighbours want the Things which we have, or have the Things which we want; and we both fight, till they take ours or give us theirs. It is a very justifiable Cause of War to invade a Country after the People have been wasted by Famine, destroyed by Pestilence, or embroiled by Factions among themselves. It is justifiable to enter into a War against our nearest Ally, when one of his Towns lies convenient for us, or a Territory or Land, that would render our Dominions round and compact. If a Prince send Forces into a Nation, where the People are poor and ignorant, he may lawfully put half of them to Death, and make Slaves of the rest, in order to civilize and reduce them from their barbarous Way of Living.’ Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Robert A. Greenberg (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Co., 1970), p. 213.

[12] Echoes of the encounter between Robin and the labourer can be found throughout the novel, from Robin’s insistence, when he explains his betrayal of Hermes to Ramy and Victoire, that he has a ‘contract’ with Babel (p. 287), to the solidarity he finds with a British worker, Abel Goodfellow, in the final chapters; I touch on this solidarity in the next section.

[13] It’s his student Anthony who uses this term for the first time: ‘Welcome to your home for the next four years’, he says on p. 74.