You’d think this is a nice, short title for this book by R. F. Kuang, but wait until you see the subtitle: Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution.
It’s a really good book. It starts with a young boy in China slowly dying of cholera. His family has all died around him, so he’s just waiting for the same fate to hit him until a white Englishman appears seemingly out of nowhere, touches him with a bar of silver and whispers a word in French. The boy is miraculously cured, at which point he is told he will be moving to England with the Englishman. He will be fed, clothed, boarded, and given an education with an emphasis on classic languages. All the Englishman asks in return is that the boy apply himself to his studies. It seems like a fair enough trade on the surface, and it’s not like the boy has anywhere else to go, so he accepts.
The Englishman (whose name turns out to be Professor Lovell) starts by telling the boy he’ll have to choose an English name for himself. Fortunately, the boy was taught English and given all the English books he could get his hands on, so he chooses the name Robin Swift after a combination of one of his favorite characters and the author Jonathan Swift, who wrote Gulliver’s Travels, which is the boy’s favorite book.
We get to see some of Robin’s life with Professor Lovell over the next several years, but the book really gets going when Robin finally makes it to Oxford. Specifically, he studies languages in the tower of Babel, and, yes, the rest of the Oxford students call them Babblers.
I should say that this book takes place in the 1830s, at the height of the Industrial Revolution. Rather than technological advancements, Kuang has created a world in which Englishmen (apparently only Englishmen) have figured out how to combine two or more similar, but slightly different, words from different languages onto silver bars. When a certain word is whispered while holding the bar, it is activated to do whatever it is designed to do.
The English have learned to use these magical silver bars all over the place to make their lives easier. Magical silver makes the trains run, controls lighting, cures the sick, etc.
During his first week at Oxford, Robin meets his roommate, an Indian boy named Ramy, and they immediately become best friends. They soon meet Victoire, a black Haitian girl, and Letty, a white English girl whose father is a wealthy admiral, but he disowned her, so she thinks her plight is the same as that of her friends of color. They keep trying to explain how their world is different from hers, but she’s predictably blind to anything that doesn’t affect her directly.
The four of them quickly become inseparable, but it’s not long before Robin has a secret he has to keep from them after he stumbles upon a robbery happening in Babel. Acting on instinct, he helps the robbers escape, if only because he’s taken aback by the fact that one of them looks remarkably like him.
Professor Lovell had never told Robin he had fathered him, but Robin figures it out pretty early on. Turns out one of the robbers Robin catches in the act is his half brother. Professor Lovell had fathered him in China and taken him back to England, but because he was raised in England, he had lost much of his ability to think in Mandarin. Lovell learned his lesson from that and made sure his next half-Chinese bastard was raised in China (in Robin’s case, Canton) so he could learn to think in both English and Cantonese.
Robin is of course fascinated to find someone who looks so much like him and shares some of his history, so of course he meets up with his half-brother, whose name turns out to be Griffin. Griffin makes Robin think about his whole world in terms he had never thought about before.
England relies on silver infused with magic to keep everything running, so they take as much silver as they can from all over the world, including places like India and China. They also need languages from places like India and China to infuse the silver with magic to do whatever it is they want it to do.
But of course none of the countries they’re taking silver and languages from see any of the benefit of the advances England is making with silver. The professors at Babel make the argument that taking language is a victimless crime because the fact that they’re using it doesn’t inhibit the natives from using it. But if they’re taking that language to infuse silver bars to create weapons they then use to kill and subjugate the natives, that certainly does hurt them. Somehow the English always manage to gloss over that part…
Robin is super conflicted because he really likes his life in Babel. He loves his three friends, he loves studying languages, he loves being warm and well-fed all the time. It’s never easy to admit that such comfort comes at a cost until you see it first hand.
Robin finally sees it first hand in his fourth year at Oxford when they go on a trip to Canton so he can act as a translator in negotiations with the Cantonese. It’s during that trip that Robin sees how opium is destroying his country, and that England is deliberately pumping opium into China so they can get rich.
Things go downhill for our plucky heroes pretty quickly after that, and I don’t want to spoil it for you, so you’ll just have to read it for yourself.
I will say that the part of the subtitle that keeps coming up “the necessity of violence,” is something I have to disagree with. The argument made in the book is that people in power will hold onto their power at all costs. Violence is allegedly required to get them to pay attention, but what about Gandhi? What about Martin Luther King Jr.? They used peace as a very effective weapon to get what they wanted from the people in power.
But just because I don’t agree with every argument this book makes, doesn’t mean I didn’t thoroughly enjoy it. And the audiobook narrator does a fantastic job, especially given all the different languages they have to deal with.