I think I mentioned in my last post I’ve been reading loads recently. The Somnolians end up suffering through me liveblogging reactions to books I read, particularly those I don’t like (which has been a grand total of two). And Letters is due for a post.
So, hello! We’re doing quick and dirty book reviews (a two-for-one deal, in fact). Spoilers ahead.
the poppy war
I’d been compiling a pretty hefty to-be-read list once I started getting back into the swing of reading. RF Kuang’s The Poppy War got added after reading some positive murmurings on r/fantasy, while somehow missing how unbelievably controversial the book is on that subreddit. You’d think Kuang shot some of these people’s dogs.
War orphan Rin works her way into a fictional China’s military academy, where she learns to harness the magic of the gods. Partway through her schooling, she’s thrown on the front lines when war breaks out with not-Japan and joins a secret arm of the military. She goes on to turn against her government and magically nukes not-Japan.
One of the first things I said about the book, from the first couple pages, was how immature it sounded. The prose is basic, casual, and modern; RF Kuang has a tendency to tell us everything (or, worse, show and tell); the trajectory of the story was predictable. The underdog wants to get into the military academy, so she studies over a few months so extensively that she has to torture herself to keep awake, and naturally she aces the exam and surpasses everyone else. She gets to the academy and is an underdog there, too, so she goes on to kick everyone’s asses at the tournament and is the only person to study Lore (which leads her to learning magic). She ends up being part of an extinct race and joins the secret magic X-Men where she goes on to become the leader. Rin is The Best To Ever Do It.
That being said, the first half of the book is dumb fun. I didn’t like the characters, but the action was exciting, and I really did take an interest in the magic system. Ascending to the celestial plane using hallucinogens and communing with a huge pantheon of gods for magic powers? Hell yeah.
Things fall apart, both for Rin and the reader, in the second half of the book. We’re pulled away from the academy setting and dropped into a bloody war with, as I mentioned, the magic X-Men. Emphasis on bloody; The Poppy War is obviously based on the Second Sino-Japanese War, and toward the end of the book includes a chapter that is, essentially, a Wikipedia entry on the Nanjing Massacre. It’s nasty, and I ended up skimming over the pages of graphic descriptions, but it left a bad taste in my mouth for the rest of the book (which I finished, because I spent $25 on this).
Anyway, turns out I don’t like grimdark. Or at least, I don’t enjoy RF Kuang’s version of it. I found the world flat, the characters annoying, and was completely unsurprised when I learned Kuang was a teenager when she wrote it. I’d give it 1.5/5 stars, and I’m not really sure who I could recommend it to. Clearly some people love it, considering it’s got 4.2 stars on Goodreads.
babel (ah shit, here we go again)
At this point, I was pretty convinced RF Kuang’s stuff was just not for me, especially since I’d seen many people say The Poppy War was the best installment in the trilogy. But I’ve got a close friend who, when I said I didn’t resonate with Kuang’s writing, said she was obsessed with her work (outside of The Poppy War, which she hadn’t read), and loaned me Babel with the hearty recommendation I read it. And sure, I’m all for second chances, and I didn’t spend another $25 on this one, so what did I have to lose but a couple weeks?
Cantonese orphan Robin is taken in by an Oxford professor and is sent to Oxford University’s Royal Institute of Translation (“Babel”), where he learns to harness the magic of translation, and is recruited into a secret resistance organization. Partway through his schooling he stumbles into a British conspiracy to overthrow China. He goes on to turn against his government and magically nukes Babel.
Hey, wait a minute—
Babel is definitely a more mature book, with markedly improved prose (maybe not beautiful, but at times good), and more respect given when it comes to depicting violence. I can understand why some people like Babel.
I didn’t. I tried, I swear, because I dread handing this book back, smiling awkwardly, and saying it was fine.
Kuang’s still got a major telling issue, and the (occasionally quarter- to half-page-long) footnotes are the most egregious symptom. Babel is not a subtle book. That’s not a problem by itself; The Lord of The Rings is by no means a subtle trilogy, but nobody’s complaining. But Kuang’s message stands in the way of the story, because exploring a theme with no subtlety is one thing, but spoon-feeding (or shoving the spoon down the throats of) readers with your point in case they start forming a dissenting opinion is a shitty experience. Why not drop the pretence of writing a novel and write a book of essays?
What makes it more annoying is that I don’t disagree with Kuang. Imperialism is bad and a cannibalizing machine; violence is, sometimes, required to shock the system and bring about change, but it can also be horrible. Babel, however, delivers its message with the subtlety of a brick through a windshield. Several of them, while I keep yelling at the page that I get it, and then I skim over a footnote that tells me the British are hypocrites when that was already conveyed eighty times over.
The prioritization hurts the characters. I wasn’t surprised by any of the turns the story takes, because the characters are very obviously categorized into good and bad. There are some shades of darker-and-lighter black and white, where the good guys might argue over tactics, or a bad guy professes to love the good guys, but everyone was shallow and vaguely annoying. Occasionally, a character’s mouth will open up and the word of god spills out for several paragraphs, and it sounds like it was written by a 21st-century academic and not someone in Victorian England, because it was. And then I read a footnote and go “God damn it, I’m reading Babel.”
Ultimately, everything in Babel points toward Kuang’s thesis. Events always demonstrate she’s right, without properly exploring counter-arguments (and no, not whether imperialism is good, but violence vs. nonviolence, for example). It feels engineered and preachy to me.
The last few paragraphs make it sound like I absolutely hated this book, but I did enjoy it more than The Poppy War. When reading, I primarily found Babel either pretty entertaining, or annoying. There are bits that shine through that are clearly personal to Kuang; coming to a Western country, going by an Anglicized name (we never learn Robin’s Chinese name, which is clearly intentional), and feeling like your identity is being erased as you meld into mainstream Western society. I see immigrants doing it here (including my brother, going by a nickname because his first name is feminine in North America—he can’t speak Portuguese, which was his first language). The concept ties in beautifully to the magic system, which is the manifestation of meaning lost over translation.
But none of it feels explored in a way that grips me. Kuang’s really good at doing that; she gives me crumbs of what the book could be, and they are excellent, so I keep going. Then I’ve read through nearly 200K words and I wondered how she wrote so much, and I feel like I didn’t get into any of it. It’s not that I didn’t understand it. Babel‘s not a hard-to-understand book; the prose is straightforward and not too dense. The hardest parts to get through were the multi-paragraph lectures from Oxford professors, because they were dull and repetitive.
I’d say Babel started off pretty solid, fell off in the second act, and recovered into something okay. The ending was satisfying enough. I didn’t feel a thing when the characters were hugging each other, crying, and dying, which is a sign the book didn’t do its job. Or maybe it did, because its job was to hammer home a thesis, and I never disagreed with Kuang in the first place. I’d give it a 2.5/5.
There are, absolutely, people who love this (again, it’s got a 4.2 on Goodreads). The prose is pretty good, the characters have moments where they’re almost likeable, and I am sure the way it’s written is super gratifying for some. There’s nothing here so egregious that I have to call it “bad.” I didn’t feel worse off for having read it, and it had some depth I wasn’t expecting given the dialogue around the book, but I’ve figured by now that Kuang’s stuff just is not for me.
