Babel

In the world of Babel, magic works by inscribing similar words onto bars of silver which manifests the difference between the words as spells. What works really great are words in translation, because few translated words have exactly the same meaning.

Babel is the story of Robin Swift, a Chinese orphan with a talent for languages who is brought to England by an professor of translation. China forbids the teaching of Chinese to foreigners, so the British Empire steals young Chinese boys to provide words in translation. It's incredibly exploitative, and Robin starts to learn just what his purpose is meant to be.

As the subtitle implies, Robin gets caught up in opposition to Oxford's use of translators powering of empire. But he also really likes the creature comforts that come with being one favored by the British Empire and would really like to keep those. Can an empire be reformed from within, but someone who is a member of a colonized people no less? Or does changing empire require violent uprising?

The story starts off very engaging, but at the point the Robin has to choose whether to go in violent opposition, the text becomes quite bogged down with repetitive arguments and discussions between characters over the ethics involved. And as the climactic confrontation approaches, every character becomes merely a vehicle for plot and discourse, devoid of much in the way of personality.

I gave this 4 stars because of some really interesting ideas and a really great start. But I wish the second half of the book lived up to the promise of the first half.

Babel was my favorite book in 2022. It's technically a fantasy, because it's both alternate history in a world with magic, but it touches on so many real-world issues that it's an unusual fantasy. Babel takes places in the early 1800s and an elite group of translators can use silver bars to create magical enchantments that do all sorts of things: heal illness, help with construction projects, and so much more. The translators are trained at a special college at Oxford called the Babel (after the Tower of Babel). The story focuses on four students who are studying at the prestigious school. One young man is from China and one from India. The other two students are women, one from Haiti and one from England. Woven throughout the story of why they were chosen to study at Babel and what their experiences are like are issues of colonialism, racism, misogyny, and classism. There is a great deal of real-world history woven throughout the story, especially issues going on in China and England at the height of the British Empire. The world building of the fantastical elements of this world are original and well done. The characters are complex, flawed, and seem real. Their experiences and the themes of the book made me think not only of the story itself, but of how the issues in the book played out in our world. The book is technically 682 pages long, but the author includes a whole bunch of endnotes about topics in the book, such as further describing real-world events. The actual story is 554 pages long. This is a book I thought about long after I finished reading it.