You Have To Wonder

Mainstream critics will often twist themselves into pretzels trying to read science fiction the way they read lit-fic; that is, they fixate on some aspect of the story and treat it as a symbol of something else. Of course these things don’t symbolize anything, they’re just some new custom or piece of technology. What does that wormhole signify? these critics wonder. Is it suggestive that there’s no actual worm in it?

One of the achievements of R. F. Kuang’s novel is that her central conceit can double as a metaphor. In the world she created, magic comes from the tension between a word in one language and its translation into another. In the early nineteenth century the foremost practitioners of this magic work at the University of Oxford, and they have started to look outside Europe for languages they can use, in places like China and Africa.

This is imperialism under a different guise, the occupying country stripping the people they conquered of their valuable resources. Here, though, the resource is language, one of the most intimate parts of a nation’s identity, as close as breath to those who speak it.

But the novel works as a narrative as well as metaphorically, moving swiftly and taking one exciting turn after another. Professor Lovell of Oxford rescues a Cantonese child who has been orphaned by a cholera epidemic. Once in England the child takes the name Robin Swift, and, because of his facility with languages, he is sent to the Royal Institute of Translation at Oxford, where Lovell teaches. He meets other students of far-flung languages: Victoire, a black student who speaks Haitian Kreyol, Letty, a white Englishwoman, and Rami, from India. He also makes the acquaintance of a secretive man who looks a lot like him.

At first Robin is enchanted with his studies, with magic, with the exotic customs and traditions of Oxford. Then he discovers the problems hidden beneath the weight of all that heritage. Although the Institute of Translation is eager to study the nuances of his language, they have little use for non-white students. He starts to wonder what will become of all his efforts, and what the English are doing with the discoveries he made in magic, especially in China.

Here’s another terrific aspect of Kuang’s worldbuilding. Robin learned Chinese from his mother; it is literally his mother tongue, and the only thing he has left from her after she died. Can he turn that gift against her people, his motherland? Especially when he realizes that Professor Lovell could have saved her from the cholera that took her life?

It’s almost inevitable that he should rebel against Oxford and the larger system that supports it. Unfortunately a fight against imperialism in the 1830s can’t go well, even in an alternate world. There is a bit of hope at the end, though.