Voice: 4/9. There’s plenty of room for improvement in Kuang’s ability of writing.

She was fond of letting Robin summarise everything dryly, omitting complete conversations, neglecting environmental depictions, and delivering didactic, unrealistic, excessive, polemic and abstruse explanations. As a result, the characters felt like cardboard, the plot seemed superficial, and the world appeared unattractive. To sum up, I wish I will never read this work again or I will never need to read any of Kuang’s works, although I definitely like this work and respect her effort.

Plot: 6/9. The fallible and gullible characters—especially the protagonist—tedious academic life without enough suspense, and depressive ambience involving morality, blood and violence made me almost desert this book midway. Nevertheless, the impressive tragic ending somehow made the previous reading crucifixion worthwhile.

After the protagonist’s mother and all his relatives had died in a cholera in Macao, he was saved and adopted by an Oxford professor called Lovell. It turned out that Lovell had hired a nanny to teach the protagonist English in the past and had visited Canton not long before the outbreak. The protagonist thought Lovell might be his father, but Lovell merely wanted to adopt him as the ward rather than son.

Lovell required him to comprehend Greek and Latin as well as English and Chinese. Once when the protagonist was too preoccupied with a novel to obey the schedule, Lovell beat him badly and shouted that the protagonist could return to China if he couldn’t study well.

After several years of hard study, the protagonist got the matriculation through special recommendation. There he met one of his neighbours, Ramy, an Indian who was also sponsored by a Briton and had long been prepared for the matriculation too. When they visited stores together, a drunken white boy humiliated Ramy for his black skin. The protagonist escaped immediately hoping to avoid a conflict. Despite this episode, the two quickly became good friends. Before long, the duo made acquaintance with other neighbours, but they seemed to get along ill.

In a high tower called Babel, the protagonist and Ramy were introduced to his classmates, Victoire and Letty. He learned that he was trained to be a magic translator that could incant translation to manipulate specially crafted silver bars.

When the protagonist helped Ramy to get back his satchel, he came across a futile theft. Amazed at an extremely similar appearance of one of these thieves, he helped them to get rid of chasers. That doppelganger, called Griffin Harley, one day approached him, introduced himself as the last child adopted by Lovell. He claimed that Lovell actually had his own family and children. And his adoption was merely a way to better exploit their motherland for the British Crown. So Griffin one day faked his death, joined the Hermes Society, stole the silver for countries in need. Feeling sympathy for the colonies and sensing alienation and discrimination in Britain, the protagonist continued assisting them in stealing silver bars out of the tower, even without much knowledge on the running details of the Hermes Society.

One day, the protagonist was invited by Pendennis, a upper-class rich profligate, to a wine party and managed to impress them with his knowledge on translation. Letty, however, had been opposing his attendance all the way and soon Victoire told that it was because Letty had a brother who had died from this kind of profligate lifestyle at this university.

The protagonist warned Griffin that Babel had just upgraded its burglar-proof system, which Griffin dismissed and handed Robin a WuXing silver bar. But during the theft, Griffin’s men triggered the alarm. Though the protagonist barely tricked the professor into believing it was the fault of the new equipment, Robin had to suture his wound alone. Griffin didn’t contact him at all for a long time. So no wonder when the next time Griffin came up suddenly with a demand of storing bombs inside Robin’s dormitory, the protagonist refused any further connection with Griffin and the organization.

The protagonist thus devoted himself to intense learning and school drama: Letty, who had been bickering with Ramy all the time, in fact secretly loved him. Ramy, aware of that secret, shunned her constantly probably because he was black. Letty thus cried over his adamant rejection in front of the protagonist. Meanwhile, Victoire didn’t favour the fact that she helped the British learn her mother tongue for benefits that would never return to her motherland. Letty didn’t understand that feeling, and therefore the duo even had a cold war.

Luckily, after they passed the final examination, all of their relationship ameliorated. At Letty’s request, they went to a luxurious promenade together. However, drunken Pendennis insulted Letty and Victoire and disrupted their enjoyable evening. The four attempted to continue the celebration on the roof of Babel, only to find that translators who couldn’t either stand outsiders’ discrimination held a party of translators only. The seniors didn’t tell them at first because experiencing a terrible party hosted by the outsiders firsthand was necessary to understand the significance of translators’ own party.

The protagonist accidentally found that Victoire and Ramy was sent by Hermes to steal from Babel by Anthony, a senior who had faked his death like Griffin and joined Hermes hereafter. Unfortunately, anti-theft mechanisms were improved so well that the protagonist saved the two at the cost of his capture. He admitted his aiding and abetting Hermes’ thefts to Lovell. Nevertheless, Lovell released him because the excellent protagonist would play an indispensable role in the translation henceforth.

The four were tasked with accompanying Lovell to help British merchants sell opium to the Chinese. Opium was now forbidden by the Chinese government, for it harmed the well-being of their citizens. However, British merchants claimed that it was free trade, demanding their confiscated contraband back. The protagonist served as one of two translators in the negotiation. Afterwards, the commander spoke to the protagonist alone and asked for the British attitude. The protagonist honestly told him that British despised Chinese. After that talk, the commander destroyed all the opium, marking the possible prelude of an inevitable war.

Lovell kept asking what exactly the protagonist had spoken to the commander. Unable to bear with Lovell’s blatant insult to his ethnicity, motherland and mother any longer, the protagonist eventually killed Lovell on the spur of the moment. His friends offered to clean the crime scene and hide the murder.

From Lovell’s correspondence, the protagonist discovered that Lovell actually conspired with some British long time ago in order to bait Chinese into a war. When the three discussed whether they should convey that information to Hermes, Letty’s overheard this and made them confess the secret of Hermes.

Soon they couldn’t hide the disappearance of Lovell any more from suspicious professors. A professor impersonated the member of Hermes to solicit more information from the protagonist. Luckily, the protagonist saw through it and Anthony led the four into a secret base and introduced them to other comrades.

Letty, the daughter of a British admiral, felt their plans of disrupting the war disgusting and secretly reported to the police. She even pointed a gun at them to coerce their surrender. Eventually she killed Ramy. All the members were executed by the police except for the protagonist and Victoire.

In the prison, Sterling tortured the protagonist for intelligence on Griffin who had an old grievance with him. Griffin later came to rescue the protagonist and Victoire. Therefore Sterling and Griffin ended up exterminating each other.

The protagonist and Victoire came back to the devastated base and buried their comrades’ corpses. They then broke into Babel and occupied there, hoping its dysfunction could force Parliament to reconsider the war with China. Some academics and townspeople volunteered to join them out of their grudge against British colonialism and industrial revolution.

In the end, the barricades were breached under the siege of British army. Some people like Victoire chose to live and they escaped away before the army’s ultimate attack, whereas the protagonist and some academics eventually sacrificed themselves by destroying Babel.

Character: 5/9. Most of them were annoying and sounded extremely alike.

Robin Swift

This kind of fallible, passive and tedious protagonist really exacerbated the discomfort rendered by the depressive plot. He made fateful mistakes so often that I barely abandoned this book and blacklisted Kuang midway:

• Why did the protagonist go to the pub called Twisted Root upon hearing its location from Victoire?
• He agreed to serve as the spy of an organization unwilling to proffer him anything including information. I don’t appreciate his imprudence and naivety: Didn’t he fear that such ignorance would only benefit another dictatorship like Britain?
• He failed to activate the WuXing bar and fell into the police’s hand.
• He initially planned to pretend to be an innocent passerby, so I was extremely dumbfounded at his immediate acknowledgment of guilt after Lovell’s minor interrogation without concrete proofs and extreme violence.
• Why did the protagonist have to tell the location of Hermes’ safety house? He could have lied that he knew nothing at all and just did this due to his childish naivety.
• I didn’t believe from the beginning that a lurid and accidental murder would let a professor memorise a student for 5 years, no matter how talented she was. The protagonist could have asked Griffin in details when they were alone.
• He deteriorated his own condition as well as aggravated the tension between two countries through such an improper response to the commander.
• He could just have pretended the murder as a disappearance like Anthony’s case. Without evidence, the official could not arrest him for long and there was no need to stay in a refuge. He could have claimed that he knew nothing and inherited Lovell’s heritage as the ward. Being a fugitive only confirmed police’s suspicion.
• Why didn’t he take the dying Griffin along with them?
• After so many events, the protagonist still didn’t master preparation! He captured Babel without bringing along enough food and supplies! His plan would have been doomed from the start, had not it been for others’ assistance and his good luck!

others

Why did Ramy and Victoire wear only black rather than masks for their heist?

World : 7/9. I would have appreciated this aspect better, if the magic could have blended in the world and history more closely and if characters could have applied the magic in their daily Oxford life more frequently.

• What was meaning of the clerics, if the translator manipulating silver bar could possess more supernatural power than the so-called servants of God? Why didn’t translators be seen as the real chosen ones? Why didn’t people there worship them instead of some charlatans?

• Since Macao was a British colony at that time, Robin joined a Malacca school that could teach him Chinese, and Babel was abundant with money, why was it that hard to summon aboriginal Chinese translators to Babel?

• I like the setting that magic derived from lost meanings during the translation, but I am curious that if word A was translated from word B, which also had the meaning of C and D, then how could it be possible that only the effect of C was realized by the silver bar? Based on the context, I supposed that the actual functionality of the word pairs needed lots of experiments to explore and confirm.

• Ramy said what made the English superior was the guns and the willingness to use them on innocent people. Then why didn’t translators figure out some mechanics to defend themselves against guns? Considering the mentioned applications of silver bars in ancient times, why didn’t silver bar predominate the warfare millennia ago?

Core: 6/9. Can a story that only showed the process and cause of violence instead of its consequence really corroborate the necessity of violence?

In addition, I didn’t think the cruelty of the British colonialism was not completely delineated in the context. The protagonist and his companions’ fatuous participation in a dangerous association led to their final tragedy, which, from my perspective, seemed not adequate enough to demonstrate the core.