Beyond grateful to NetGalley and HarperCollins UK Audio for granting me the opportunity to listen to the Babel audiobook for free; words cannot express!

I've been wanting to read Babel for a while now - ever since I found out about it, actually. Having read The Poppy War, I knew without a doubt that I would love the writing and the worldbuilding; I knew that it would be an impressive and potentially exhausting read, both in sheer density and emotion, and I wasn't wrong. Babel is another masterpiece from R K Kuang, and the easiest 5 stars in a long time, for me.

Beyond the writing, that I could wax poetic about for days just as much as anyone else, this novel is brought together through the strong and though-provoking themes discussed throughout; the complex and completely realistic characters; the fantasy genre mixed with dark academia and historical realities; the range of emotions experienced by the reader. I haven't read a book that has made me ugly cry quite like this one for the longest time; I spent the entire last thirty minutes of the audiobook sobbing without abandon!

I went from adoring many of the characters, to being distraught by their choices and actions, to being angry at betrayals that were always making their way to the forefront, to fighting a bittersweet happiness, to feeling the revolution running through my veins, to experiencing an ending both soul-destroying and satisfying, at the same time.

The literary elements and the idea of translation scholars at Oxford were so interesting to me, even if often this took a while to get my head around and certainly managed to humble me; I've probably never felt less intelligent than during some moments of this! But I also felt I was learning so much. Not just about the literature elements, but about the British Empire and colonialism which is truly what is at the heart of this novel. It demands that we acknowledge the history of our country, and the damage caused by people like us to those who have always been 'othered' in society.

I am glad, actually, that I was able to experience the audiobook before the actual book. Having never really listened to an audiobook before, I was unsure how I would feel about the vehicle of reading - but the narrators were really wonderful. The main narrator had such a calming but effective story-telling voice, and his ability to mirror the accents and pronounce the languages and change the tone of his voice so that eventually you knew, instantly, which character was speaking, was phenomenal! It meant you weren't taken out of the story and the world for one moment, without clumsy transitions or having to try and decipher the conversationalists.

I also think the audiobook has the benefit of being able to voice the footnotes and little explanations without taking away from the story, and made a lot of the more difficult translations and asides easier to understand. I've bought the book (of course) because it is beautiful and I definitely want to read (and re-read!) it physically, but the audiobook is such a great companion that I think all readers of Babel would benefit from it, honestly.

Without giving away any direct spoilers, I am still heartbroken over losses felt within these pages, and think I might always will be - definitely a book I will be thinking about for a long, long time after finishing,

Thank you to R F Kuang for helping to reignite my love for reading, and for being an author forever on my 'automatic read' list now!

For me, Babel is a perfect example of why you shouldn’t buy into the hype surrounding a book. Sadly, it just wasn’t a book I could get into, or even enjoy.

I’ll start by saying that I loved the idea behind the book, and the magical system and world the author has created was extremely unique and clever. However, this wasn’t allowed to flourish or come to fruition at all. And that leads to main big critique of the book.

For me, the book reads as an anti-imperial, anti-empire rant. It gets so caught up in preaching about the…evilness of the white man in this fantasy 19th century world, that the story underneath all the hate was crushed and stilted.

Added to this, I found the characters very flat and unlikeable, and I just couldn’t warm to them.

Maybe this book just wasn’t for me, it’s a shame, as I feel like there was a lot of potential here.

And as a footnote to all the above, the footnotes were jarring and added nothing to the story.

Babel is a fantastic alternative history of Oxford and the British empire. Given the decline of the British reputation post Brexit (or the more gradual decline before) this was oddly poignant: the ego, the imbalance of negotiations and the taking of culture and resources from poorer nations.
A young group of university students soon discover the circumstances that lead them to becoming students in Oxford’s Babel college, translating texts and engraving silver bars, were more planned than they thought.
The magic system is integral to the story but at the same time oddly low key - certain pairs of words or symbols engraved into silver can change the fabric of the world allowing for automotive transport, industry and war machines. The Tower of Babel is integral in producing these bars and hence automating the world.
This group of students soon start to see the corruption in their new lives and the unfair relations Britain has with poorer nations. On one trip to China this becomes even more prominent and they start to rebel.
This was very immersive, the reader really feels like they are in Victorian Oxford with so much real life history twinned with fictional aspects embedding an excellent and compelling tale.
This book really made me feel ashamed to be British, though the current political goings-on may have contributed to this.

Thank you to NetGalley and to the publisher for giving me this eArc audiobook to review.

I enjoyed the narration to this but did find it a little jarring when the second narrator would interject here and there. I see why this was done but it still managed to pull me out of the book.

I also found that Dark Academia is not for me as a genre so I did not finish the book, however, it is well written and many people will like this book/audiobook.

An epic fantasy book of dark academia, which is truly captivating. The research put into this book, paired with the amazing world building really makes this fascinating and convincing.

Years of British colonialism, culminates in deep seated racism, leading to resentment and power struggles in a world of magic, not that very different from our own.

The characters are nuanced and well rounded, meaning I was fully invested in what happened to each one.

The comparisons to Philip Pullman are well deserved. This is a fantastic and thought-provoking book. I feel privileged to have been given a copy of this book to review by HarperCollins and Netgalley.

OMG this book is amazing. I have a new favourite book of the year. Everyone needs to read this.

This is the one book of the year which i will recommend to everyone

I went into this with a lot of trepidation. I wasn't the biggest fan of The Poppy War, and am still just dipping my toes into Dark Academia, so was nervous about this one.
However, I was very pleasantly surprised. I wasn't sure what I thought of it for a while, it was definitely one to sit on for a bit.
I thought it was similar in structure to The Poppy War in that there is 50% school based and then 50% post school- war/conflict. I liked that and I liked the footnotes (controversial opinion, I know).
Overall, I liked it a lot more than I thought, loved the premise and the use of language especially the history behind different phrases.

“Betrayal. Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?”

TW: Assault/Blood/Child abuse/Death of a parent/Drug use/Gun violence/Murder/Racism/Slavery/Torture/Violence

Babel was a really bizarre mix for me - dark academia which I like in theory but rarely in practise - and language which I find super interesting. So I found the book very powerful and I liked many parts of it, but I also found it really dense and it kind of drained me and I had to keep coming back to it.
I guess I’m not surprised it was dense. It wasn’t meant to be a light read, it’s meant to be a read that makes you think, that makes you assess the world. I think that’s why I didn’t mind putting it down - because, when I felt I was slogging through it, I didn’t enjoy it, but I did enjoy it when I’d had a break.
How it used language was so interesting. I loved a magic system based on language, it was really clever. And I think it was a really effective way of showing how the British have used other cultures for their gain.
I think the four main characters were a great combination. We almost had a sliding scale of oppressed from white to not-white.
The plot and the setting were perfectly chosen to illustrate the story. I liked the use of footnotes and how the author explained and justified historical changes/context.
I think it’s a good read when you’re in the right mindset. It’s interesting and powerful and shows historical events in kind of a more accessible context.

I’m not a fan of audiobooks but this one might just make me a convert. Perfect story for any word nerd.m or simply someone who’s tried to learn a new language. History, mystery and intrigue, what more could you ask for? The characters were well developed and I loved seeing them grow. The plot kept me intrigued and the narration was fabulous. I’m definitely checking out the other book by this author. I received a free audiobook copy in exchange for an honest review. Highly recommend.

This is a rich and sweeping tale of Oxford in a reimagined universe where silverworking - imbuing silver with the difference between translated words to manifest a magical response - has made the British Empire the most powerful in the world. Robin Swift, our main character, is a mixed-race Chinese young boy who was brought to England to train as a translator at the silverworking tower - Babel - at Oxford and engage in the privileged life that this affords him. But as a mixed-race immigrant, Robin is inexorably forced to confront the colonialist history and power of the British empire.
So much for the plot itself. On to the novel!
This book was a slog. On the plus side, it was meticulously researched. It's clearly built on Kuang's own academic reserach, which seeps throught he page at every point, from the title of the book - what an academic colon-riddled title! - to the fact that the author uses footnotes to add an additional narrator with expansions on several points in the text. It has a lot of thoughtful comments on translation, on resource sharing, on colonialism, on how colonial powers take from the countries they colonise, on the role of people of colour in the UK, and how that impacts how they live their lives. There are some really powerful scenes where the main characters experience discrimination, and there are some really powerful intersectional comments as well - Victoire, as a Black woman scholar at Oxford in the 1800s, is facing a multiplicity of issues which she illuminates clearly to her friends in several really powerful scenes.

That's ... kind of it for enjoyment of this book, though. It was a slog to read. It was dull, honestly, in several places, because there were several segments of the book which were literally just lectures on translation theory. Interesting, yes, but also ... not what I look for in my dark academia novels. This book was hard work. The main character, and the secondary characters, were dull and defensive and not particularly well fleshed-out. At times, in fact, they felt little more than paper-thin caricatures of particular stereotypes or tropes, and I felt very little for them. Plot-wise, this book was dull, for the most part. It was mostly just a young man going to university, while we sat in on his lectures. There were some exciting interludes, but my God, not enough.
I felt preached to throughout this book. Preached to about the evils of colonialism and of the white man, especially.
I realise that white people have historically occupied a position of privilege and have been historically colonisers and oppressors, but the white people in this book are paper-thin caricatures incapable of nuance or understanding. And honestly, that's frustrating. As a white person from a country which was colonised by the British - and which is still partitioned thanks to the British! - I felt kind of offended by the way an entire ethnicity was presented here. I was particularly disappointed by the character of Cathy O'Nell, who's stated to be a scholar of Gaelic. But is she Irish or Scottish? Who cares, they're all the same, right? And why is she O'Nell, a hugely uncommon surname, rather than O'Neill, which is one of the ten most common names in Ireland? Wouldn't she have been an interesting character to use to explore the perspective of a white person on colonial Britain?
Honestly, my other complaint was that the magic system is inventive, yes, but the way it's executed leaves a lot to be desired. The Industrial Revolution is given the name the 'Silver Industrial Revolution' and then not changed in any way, other than to give the characters a way to control or influence the dominant position of Britain in global industry. Which is disappointing in the extreme. Honestly, the entire world is changed by silverworking, but the only noteworthy difference is that the coronation of Queen Victoria happens a year earlier? Dull. There is so much more Kuang could have done with this.

Finally, the structure of the book bothered me. Robin was naive, yes, and often defensive of his position, but the omniscient narrator who interrupts the narrative with footnotes was patronising and dull. It felt, at times, like the main narrative said something like 'Robin felt this might have been racist' and the footnotes interrupt to say 'this was racist', and don't trust the reader to actually have any critical thinking skills at all.

I listened to the audiobook version of this, which was narrated by two narrators, one male, one female. This exacerbated my problem with the footnotes, because they were narrated by Billie Fulford-Brown, and it felt like she was bustling in as an officious busy-body explaining the things I was too stupid to understand or infer from the text. There were also several instances where the main text would say a phrase in Chinese, and the footnote would then say the exact same phrase in the same way. I assume that, in the written text, this is the difference between pinyin and hanzi, but for the audiobook listener, it is utterly bewildering.

Both narrators did a generally good job on this book. I listened to it in the car a lot, and found it difficult at times to hear Chris Lew Kum Hoi when the characters were agitated or whispering - the sound levels weren't consistent, and it meant it was something that I often had to rewind and listen to again. Billie Fulford-Brown was clear and articulate, albeit felt patronising at times. At one point, the narrator refers to a character not havig their usual Polish (the nationality) when the text, presumably, says polish (appearance), which made me laugh.

Overall, while there's clearly a huge amount of research and depth in this book, I found myself frustrated and patronised by it, and disappointed in the lack of actual plot, character development, or, really, fun.

Thank you NetGalley for providing me with an arc of the audiobook in exchange for an honest review.

I go into most books totally or partially blind so I had no idea what to expect.

And honestly I really loved it ! The narrator dis a pretty good job with the different accents and managing to personnify each different characters

I didn't really know what to expect going into this. I hadn't read any of the author's previous work. I think that the beginning of this book was a bit slow, and I didn't fully understand where it was going for an embarrassingly long time. I think I had blinders on despite the author giving me so many clues along the way of what was to come. By the second half of the story, I was entranced. I was angry and hurt and I wanted desperately for a happy ending, and I think that there's a very healthy amount of disappointment in this book that left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. It was unsettling and I absolutely love that in a book. It was not a comfortable read and as they were fighting their battles in the book, I felt like I too was fighting through a million emotions at once.

Already had a copy of the hardback but was lucky enough to recieve an arc of the audiobook and I'm so glad I did.

R.F.Kuangs writing in this book is beautiful. This book is the perfect example of a dark academia novel. After Poppy War I was excited to see what Kuang came up with and this book did not disappoint. It isn't a typical fantasy, more a historical fiction with a fantasy twist but despite not being the biggest historical fiction fan this book had be hooked.

The voice actors for the audiobook were great, they really helped to build the characters for me. I enjoyed being able to listen to this book as I found myself struggling with getting through my physical copy.

4.75 🌟

PLOT:

This book focuses on our main character, Robin Swift, who is taken from his homeland of Canton as a child after his mother's death by a mysterious scholar named Prof Lovell to study languages. With nothing to lose, his situation appears to be an improvement on the poverty he experienced back home - but it quickly becomes apparent how 'Empire' has become the wealthy place it is. A young student at Oxford's Babel Institute as a student of translation, Robin finds out about the one thing keeping the Empire in place - silver-working. A very light-touch fantasy novel where silver can be formed into a magical element, this tiny detail is a crucial part of this 'nearly' accurate 1836 Oxford.

THE TITLE:

Babel is a title I completely understood almost from the beginning of the book, but the secondary title, The Necessity of Violence, only becomes prominent towards the latter quarter. This shift in tone from the beginning towards the end of the novel made us as a reader come alongside Robin and experience his feelings. He is not your standard main character who actively chooses to put themselves in a situation, but at every turn is pulled into politics and situations he doesn't understand. The book is quite long, admittedly, but the content is such that due to the length of time we spend with the characters, we feel it more vividly when things start shifting.

REVIEW:

Initially I was interested simply because I'm a lover of languages and thus the idea of a translator's institute being the main focus of a book like this was right up my alley. It was great academia vibes and truly felt like at times I was back to my university days. But the reason it kept me hooked was the sometimes subtle and sometimes not commentary it did alongside that of identity, the sense of belonging, the sense of otherness and the inability to fit in, of what a family is, of how languages connect you to a certain place, how nothing can ever be fully translated without losing or changing some meaning. It did also contain quite a bit of action; this began towards the second half of the book and kept me at the edge of my seat, and I genuinely wasn't sure how the book was going to end.

The only reason I clarified it is 4.75 rather than 5 full stars (despite happily rounding to that) was the fact that the origins of words, which lecturers and students will often explain during their lessons and outside of them, are a tad tiring after a while. I love listening to them but also found I probably didn't need to hear all of them as most of them were irrelevant to the central plot and just tangents by the speakers.

NARRATOR(S):
I listened to this book in audio format (<i>courtesy of HarperCollins UK Audio via NetGalley for an honest unbiased review</i>) and found the narrator excellent. The only minor thing I will say is that at times the audio dipped a bit, but that may well have been my earphones faltering. I also think at times the second narrator would come in to clarify certain things, possibly in the physical version these would have been footnotes (though I struggle to envision how these would be in the text having only listened to the audiobook). At times it was just repeating what the first narrator said with a more accurate accent which didn't feel necessary (the second, more accurate narrator could have been the only one to say those things). The pacing of the narrator was excellent and I enjoyed the way he portrayed the different accents (especially the Scottish Mrs Piper). A very enjoyable listen!

OVERALL
This book was absolutely brilliant. It dealt with topics in a very delicate way, and I found myself thinking a lot about the morality behind certain actions, and funnily enough, the Necessity of Violence in certain situations. Absolutely brilliant - I will now be reading the Poppy War by R.F.Kuang as her writing is captivating!

This book was good, if a little too on the nose for its theming. I can see a lot of people really liking this book (and the reviews back it up), but so often I was left wishing Kuang would just trust her readers a little more. The characters were fine, I did end up liking them, but their journey throughout the book felt unrealistic to me because they just immediately begin with the ideals that Kuang wants them to have, instead of coming to terms with how colonialism and imperialism is bad through time. Being indoctrinated into a system usually clouds how you perceive that system, especially in youth, but here it just seems like all the characters immediately hate the British and I don't think that they would.

Also, I detested the footnotes. There's one footnote where major characterization to a major character is relegated to a footnote, and at the time I read it, I considered docking an entire star for how much I hated that footnote - characterization does not belong in footnotes. Find a way for your MC to learn that information throughout the story, or leave that part ambiguous. But more generally, I didn't find the footnotes added anything, they felt tacked on to show how much Kuang knows about a subject, and on audio the footnotes were extremely jarring.

I did find the end very good. In fact, the last third I was very into, even if like I said earlier, I wish Kuang trusted her readers a little more. The magic system was nonsensical but I can see why Kuang decided to include it, and it's so minimal that you can basically pretend the entire magic system is a giant daydream from the main character in order to make his studies more exciting, and the book is actually just historical fiction.

If it seems like I"m harsh on the book, its only because the praise has been so overwhelming and a bit strange. But I also don't think the book deserves the hate it gets. I saw someone say that basically everyone agrees on what Babel is, but disagree on whether that's good, and I concur with that. This book will really work for some and be hated by others, but I just find myself in the middle, seeing both sides, having enjoyed this book but wished for something better.

Babel, a dark academic fantasy about ‘the violence of colonialism, and the sacrifices of resistance’, is a story I’m still thinking about weeks later, full of early His Dark Materials vibes. Within its story, it explores everything from translation and academia to colonialism and capitalism. Robin Swift’s experience of 1800s Oxford was devastating, marvellous, and transformative in equal measure.

I now need to pick up The Poppy War!

A wonderful book, rich in language, world building and comment of colonialism. Thought provoking, plausible and enthralling. R.F Kuang is a great discovery, similar in style to Natasha Pulley.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for allowing me to listen to the audiobook for Babel by R F Kuang.

This was one of my most anticipated reads of the year and it did not disappoint. Alternative historical, dark academia at its best. Who knew he world of translation and polyglots could be so exciting and dangerous. Great characters and an exciting plot meant that I sped through the book. I will definitely now be purchasing a physical copy. I highly recommend this book.

I feel like Babel is the type of book that deserves a long, flowery review - but still, I'll try to be short and succinct, because I don't think I CAN properly express how absolutely epic and devastatingly beautiful (or beautifully devastating?? Both work) this book was.

In Babel, we follow four Oxford students, studying at the Institute of Translation - Robin, our narrator and center character, his roommate and best friend, Ramy, and their two friends, Victoire and Letty. We start this book with Robin being "saved" from his hometown in China, which has been riddled with an illness by an Oxford scholar (that definitely has no ulterior motives, nope), getting a "proper" education and being sent off to study at Oxford in a couple of years. There we meet the other four main actors - his three friends and his brother. Griffin and Robin share a father (the oh so good benefactor), but Robin never heard of Griffin before because he defected from the "respectable" Oxford cause to join the rebels, the Hermes Society, that is working to slowly destabilize the British Empire and give fair treatment and opportunities to its colonies and "friendly" partners in trade like China. As Robin becomes more and more enmeshed with the Hermes Society, he starts to question his upbringing, his believes, and everything he stands for.

Babel is a glorious (in its description of the studies, architecture, etc.) and realistic depiction of the mighty British Empire of the 19th century; of the rampant racism, class differences, sexism, misogyny, colonialism, etc. Just a bad place to be if you were not a mid-class (or higher) white man (which... a lot hasn't changed, right?). Babel deals with all the ugly, while still taking the time to celebrate the beautiful - the friendships between our four MCs, the dedication and loyalty (to an extent), the camaraderie between many POC students, and in the end, the readiness of a small group of Oxford scholars to fight for justice.

I don't want to say too much about the book to not spoil anyone anything (I read the whole book soon after it came out and the beauty - and anxiety, honestly - of not knowing what is to come even heightened my enjoyment of the book) - but I will say this: Read Babel! It taught me stuff, it emotionally ruined me, I can't wait to reread it at some point in the future. All the stars!

Admittedly, Babel is a bit of a mess, but at its best, it's an educative and stimulating fantasy novel rooted in reality.

The general tone of the novel really reminded me of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell with its descriptions of 1800s England, footnotes and magical takes on true institutions and events. I generally enjoy those kinds of stories – slow and patient with the world they're building, gentle and sensible with the characters they're creating. This world felt alive and full of details and it felt like an enjoyable balance between coming-of-age story and historical fiction.

This is an ode to the beauty of language. The parts I enjoyed most were those concerned with the art of translation. They've been clearly written by someone who knows a lot about the subject and we're all benefitting from it. At different instances Kuang tracks the origins of specific words, which are often surprising and make you more conscious of how language develops and evolves over the course of dozens of generations! It also contains some very interesting thoughts on why translators are true artists – the argument made is that while authors can use any words they like, translators are limited in language and yet are challenged to get both the tone as well as the details right. No easy task for sure.

The further we go, we less didactic this whole thing becomes – and also less interesting. What starts of as a slow-burner suddenly picks up pace in the second half and with the action came the disinterest. The themes stay interesting: Kuang asks questions about the true nature of academia and (like the title suggests), what is needed in order to make changes happen. Can an institution be changed from within, or does it require its diminishment from outside forces? All of this is set in context with the crude problems colonialism brings with it.

While I love the ambition and the ideas, I just had a real hard time staying engaged. Suddenly it became an issue that no characters truly interested me personally, as they and their interactions all felt pretty generic and interchangeable. It's also quite one-dimensional in its treatment of good and bad: authorities are bad, institutions are problematic, colonialists are evil. I would have enjoyed a more nuanced look at the individuals in this story. And yet – despite its weaknesses there are certain things that felt fresh and new to me, which is something I really love in novels these days.