R. F. Kuang, _Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution_

TURNS OUT THAT while American speakers (I am one) pronounce the title of this novel to rhyme with "rabble," British speakers pronounce it to rhyme with "table." Hmm. 

I would not have picked this one up had it not been chosen by our book club, but it was an enjoyable enough read. If Waugh's Brideshead Revisited and the Harry Potter series had a child, and that child was raised by Edward Said's Orientalism and Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, that child would be this book.

Like the first half of Brideshead Revisited, most of Babel is set in Oxford, and POV character Robin Swift is as in love with the place as Waugh's Charles Ryder was: the Gothic architecture, the swish of the academic gowns, the ancient traditions, the feeling that one is at the center of the intellectual universe.

As in the Harry Potter series, we spend most of our time with a group of students who became close friends, even a kind of chosen family, and their studies involve a kind of magic. The England of Babel is mostly the actual England of the 1830s, except that silver ingots are capable of taking what is "lost in translation" between words in two different languages and manifesting that difference as some kind of energy or other phenomenon. In the novel, it is mastery of silver's potential that has made England a wealthy imperial power. This capacity of silver also has the effect of placing the humanities, especially at Oxford, at the heart of power. 

In the novel, then, linguistic knowledge is not pursued for its own sake, but for the sake of the power it generates. This is where Edward Said comes in. The English pursuit of knowledge about India, China, Islam, etc., was never disinterested, Said argued--it was always conjoint with the ends of empire, always about power. And so it is in Babel.

What will it take to overthrow this empire? One could try to reason with empire, persuade it to give up power in the name of justice, morality, and human dignity. Kuang seems not to expect that to happen, hence the alternate title "the Necessity of Violence," which I will note does not appear on  the cover of the paperback edition I bought. Again, hmm. Why not? Anyway, like Fanon, Kuang's revolutionary translators decide persuasion will not suffice. The empire can only be overcome by force.

I wonder whether the film rights have been sold. The movie's end could be spectacular.