The name says it all, really. The book is, ostensibly, a novelized history of a revolution that never was, and why violence became a necessity. It focuses on a specific cohort of students at a fictional, fantastical Oxford, told from Robin’s perspective. From the time he was taken by a guardian and made to imbibe language as a facility to make magic happen. On silver bars match-pairs of words in different languages are etched, then spoken. The translation, the dissonance between the two words creates an effect when this is done. What’s more is Britain runs on silver; a new silver revolution, rather than the evolution of technology, dominates and subsists and oppresses the colonies.

It works beautifully as an abstraction because it shows how dependent a colonizer is on labour, in this case specialized, and it manages to condense an abstraction of an industrial revolution, and the severe impact it had on the stratification of class. The cohort are the literal lifeblood of Britain going forward because they need language that is not in popular use, as it’s essentially watered down, and so people foreign born as translators are pivotal. To invoke the magical effects the translator/speaker must understand exactly the etymology thinking of the words. Which is why people who are not fluent and think and dream in the language can’t simply use any language at all.

Robin is Chinese born, Ramy Indian born, Victoire Haitian born (I believe?), and Letty, the only white person in the cohort is the only native and I think is a classist, if I recall. In much of the book it’s a dark academia campus novel, very political and forces the students to confront their immense privilege and their indoctrination of the colonial mindset, while also keeping them immensely busy at learning their trade. It’s demanding, punishing, and exploitive. As the plot proceeds the cohort uncovers more about Babel—the centralized, proprietary building from which all the silver is stored, maintained, researched, etcetera. With the knowledge of how the country and the institution perpetuates it’s western colonial, racist attitudes and strangle hold over foreign soil, we witness the slow galvanization of the cohort and others, which culminates into the aforementioned revolution. Shifting from campus novel, to more of a fantasy drama.

This isn’t action-packed, it’s fairly meticulous in it’s plotting. It’s overtly didactic, political, and concerned with building the relationships out between Robin and cohort, along with the course work. I found the world building and the granular lectured on translation and theory absolutely riveting. I bet that won’t be the case for everyone. The weakest part of the novel for me was how incessantly the exposition is. It does not trust the reader whatsoever. Every tiny detail has to be voiced because it wants the reader to come to the Correct answer. In fairness, that’s probably helpful to lots of readers after what we saw from the BLM protests. Most people do buy propaganda from the state and haven’t confronted their own nationalism and internalized socio-economic status—but it does make for annoying reading sometimes because it is so heavy handed that things are reiterated and the characters became ideologue caricatures, ironically, only ever speaking to voice their positions. It begins to subsume the work done at the beginning of humanizing them and showing them as unique individuals, because as it goes on, they do feel reduced to wind up toys on set paths that are extremely well foreshadowed, such that most everything is predictable. Certainly the ending, whom betrays whom, who is put in danger and dominated for death. Really, I think I was surprised once.

It is ironic, since black and brown and queer bodies don’t have the option of ever having identities that don’t revolve around the political, and that’s the thing that kept me from connecting to them fully. In relation to a plot, all their paths are set trajectories. Thinking back, I can remember very few personal details. And there are even interlude chapters that could be great, offering up internal machinations of characters who never really say much except how they feel about one another, yet always feel vapid and formless and abstracted. I didn’t believe them. And then they get set on their paths, so it was just fine, not great.

The prose gets out of the way is great at reducing things to the easily understood. The plot itself does a great job of communicating the message. But everything did not feel organic coming to that point. You can see the puppeteer, so it’s fun, but you’re never really taken in.

3.5 rounded up because I think with the title and synopsis it achieves its goals, but I am fairly disappointed. I had high hopes for this. One of the only pre orders of the year I had made.