I’ve seen in r/books there are already some posts about Babel by RF Kuang and I haven’t finished reading the book yet either, but I need to get a few words off my chest because on the one hand it’s so upsetting and frustrating to me (I write children’s plays myself) how the created world is treated.
So I’ll try to write spoiler-free here and stay general.
I think this intertwining of silver (the wealth and the colonies) with magic is pretty good for now. Also, the way magic works could be so good, but it’s not. There is hardly anything done with the possibilities that drives the actions forward. Then you create sorcerer’s apprentices, but hardly let them do any magic.
I have the feeling that the author doesn’t know what scenes or situations are. The treatises on languages are sometimes quite interesting, but everything else, any tension or possible plot arc is dissolved shortly after it’s established because she doesn’t know how to put threads together. Everything works so singularly.
All the characters are more or less the same and barely distinguishable from each other and completely irrelevant and witless.
A big disappointment, but I still have to finish it because I’ve already invested so much.
Whenever I read something like this, I think I have to write a novel too.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
by heqbert
1 Comment
As someone that finished the book, I think you went into this expecting a plot-driven fantasy, but it’s actually a plot-light treatise on imperialism and language. If you don’t care about those two things the novel is inevitably a disappointment, and if you do you’ll probably tend to like it.
I find the characters to all be very good as well, and I have no idea how you can say that eg Robin is the same as Richard is the same as Lettie. The differences between the characters is what drives several plot points later on (without spoiling), so it’s not an argument that makes much sense.