Wow. WOW. What. A. Book!

Safe to say there has been plenty of hype surrounding this book but it more than lives up to it. The story is brilliantly crafted on every level, and completely took me by surprise.

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All I knew about this book going in was that it was dark academia, it was about translation, and that it critiqued the euro-centric elements of academia. While all of these things are true, they barely scratch the surface.

The setting is an alternate industrial revolution-era Britain, where silver rather than steam has fuelled the British Empire. Only translators can work silver – I will save the how and why because it’s fascinating and revealed so well – and the more languages you have access to, the more powerful you are.

Enter Robin Swift, an orphan from Canton who is ‘taken in’ by an English professor and primed for an education at Babel, the world’s most prestigious and powerful translation centre. He makes friends, studies hard, and creates a life for himself in Oxford, but soon comes to question the place Babel has in the empire.

It’s a long book (the audiobook was over 20 hours), and the first half is what I would call ‘dark academia shenanigans’ – friendships forged over research, late nights in the library, secret societies, and so on. Not only is this part of the book a good read in its own right, it brilliantly sets up the world, the research, the inner workings of this version of empire for the second half of the book.

There are so many layers to the story: there’s the surface level plot; intricate and shifting friendships; commentary on the way languages and culture are exploited in the name of empire, and on the inaccessibility of education and academia. It’s a long book, yes, but never a dull one, and one that has you on the edge of your seat in the final chapters.

The only drawback I had – and this is a small criticism – is I wish there had been a different, or shorter, author’s note. The book began with an in-depth, slightly defensive explanation of all of the historical and geographical liberties taken. While clearly well-meant, its only effect was the smug feeling I got every time I spotted an inaccuracy that wasn’t specifically addressed.

The narration is fantastic, and its no easy feat for one person to keep me engaged for so long! The footnotes had a different narrator altogether, which made them easily distinguishable and kept the tone of having an aside, rather than making them part of the main text. My only small complaint is there were a couple of mispronunciations (Michaelmas, for example, was read as ‘Michael-muss’ rather than ‘mick-ul-muss’ – I can’t speak to any of the non-English pronunciations) which only bothered me in that it’s a book specifically about language and translation, and the book opened with the previously mentioned author’s note. But if an author’s note and a couple of mispronunciations on the audiobook are my biggest complaints, that speaks volumes to the quality of the book, both the text and the audio performance.

I was hoping I would enjoy this book; I was not expecting it to be one of the best books I’ve read this year, and perhaps one of the best I’ve read ever. Don’t doubt the hype; this is a brilliant book that is destined to become a modern classic.

I received a free copy of the audiobook for review. All opinions are my own.