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The Italian word for disappointment is delusione, from the Latin de-ludus, literally “to make fun of��. Its closest cognate in the English language is delusion, which the Oxford Dictionary defines as “an idiosyncratic belief or impression maintained despite being contradicted by reality��.

R. F. Kuang has me stuck in a never-ending cycle of delusion and disappointment. I keep convincing myself that I’m going to love her next book, and she makes fun of me by delivering something that doesn’t remotely match my expectations. Then she publishes a new book, and the cycle repeats.

Babel, in particular, seemed like the kind of novel I’ve been wanting to read for years. As a former translator, I was excited to learn more about its language-based magic system. As a reader, I’ve grown increasingly tired with the romanticization of academia and the classism inherent in the dark academia genre. And as someone whose family was deeply affected by European imperialism, I am keenly interested in fiction that discusses this topic.

The premise, then, was stellar; the execution, not so much.

My first issue was worldbuilding. To create an organic fantasy world, an author should either pick their setting based on how they want magic to work, or pick their magic system based on what makes sense for the setting. Instead, Kuang picked her setting (Victorian England) and her magic system (words translated on silver bars) based on the themes she wanted to tackle, with no apparent consideration for the actual compatibility of the two in real life. The result is a world that looks and works exactly like the real British Empire, even though its magic has nothing to do with the technology the British used.

This leads to a number of absurd conclusions that are ultimately detrimental to the book’s message. Historically, the reason Britain invented and developed the technology that led to the Industrial Revolution was that this technology required huge investments, made possible by the exploitation of the colonies. But translating words and engraving them on silver bars doesn’t require any sort of advanced technology.

Besides the cost of silver, which we’re told is abundant in the colonies, there are no reasons why any advanced civilization couldn’t develop their own institute of translation. The idea that translation alone is responsible for the technological superiority of the British Empire is ludicrous. Frankly, the only reason someone would come up with that idea is that they idolize translation to a point where they think it could actually be the single most important form of knowledge in human history.
Which, considering that Kuang is herself a translator, doesn’t seem like a far-fetched idea.

This single-minded obsession with the novel’s themes is also reflected in its characters. All of them are written not as multi-faceted humans, but as spokespeople for a certain perspective the author wants to portray. Robin is a British-Chinese man torn between his two identities; Rami is an anti-colonial activist who hates the Empire; Lettie is a privileged white woman; every British man is a cruel, evil imperialist devoid of humanity.

These are not people. They’re allegories.
And listen, I can appreciate a good allegory. But these characters aren’t even deep or original stand-ins for the concepts they’re meant to represent. All their political discussions seem to have been taken straight out of Twitter. If you’re on social media and even tangentially interested in postcolonial discourse, I guarantee you’ve heard it all before. Throughout the book I kept wondering, what is it that Kuang is trying to say with these didactic, on-the-nose explanations? That the British Empire was racist? That colonialism is bad? That workers were exploited during the Industrial Revolution? But you don’t need to convince your 21st century readers of this. And those who may still need convincing (bigots) will certainly not be swayed by a book that depicts all English people as evil, chauvinistic imperialists.

It doesn’t help that Babel has absolutely no trust in its audience’s ability to pick up subtext or understand its themes on their own. Instead, the author constantly interjects the narration with footnotes that are meant to clarify what is already obvious to anyone with minimal reading comprehension skills. These notes tell us that the racist things racist characters say are, in fact, racist; that Britain’s wealth comes from it being an exploitative colonial empire; that astrology doesn’t actually work; and other things that no human being with a functioning brain would possibly need explaining. These notes are also extradiegetic, meaning that they’re external to the narration: it’s not a fictional character writing them, but the author herself, who is directly addressing her modern readers. This felt very condescending and took me out of the story, causing me to wonder who Kuang thinks she’s writing for, if she envisions her ideal reader as someone who needs to have everything over-explained to them.

Until it dawned on me that so much of this book wasn’t written for me, or any other human reader. It was written for Twitter—specifically, an imaginary Twitter user who only exists in Kuang’s head, and whose entire existence revolves around levelling petty, bad faith criticism at her writing. This user gets really riled up about her making up a new building to house the Oxford Institute of Translation, in her fantasy novel about a made up Oxford Institute of Translation. They complain about her obviously racist villains not being condemned enough by the narrative. They get upset about a revolutionary character killing an innocent girl, in a book that is literally titled The Necessity of Violence.

Problem is, you can’t write a book for someone like that. First of all, because this person is not real: they’re a mental image conjured by the author’s own anxieties and insecurities. Secondly, because no good art has even come out of a need to pre-emptively defend oneself from baseless accusations. And thirdly, because despite Kuang’s best efforts, it’s impossible to make criticism-proof art.

I understand that it can be difficult to shut down the bad faith reader inside your head. Still, authors need to stop writing to convince an imaginary person that they’re morally righteous, and start treating their readers like intelligent adults who can figure things out on their own.

Because there is a good story buried in here. If you take away the repetitive, superfluous explanations that bog down the narrative; if you add some complexity and nuance to the characters�� personality; if you give the audience a chance to think for themselves instead of lecturing them; you get an interesting novel that attempts to deconstruct the dark academia genre through the lens of language and translation. And this potential is particularly evident in the last 10% of the book, which ended up adding a star to my final rating. The last few chapters are truly powerful and emotionally resonant, imbued with a raw sincerity the rest of the novel lacks. I just wish it didn’t take me so long to get there.