Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of The Oxford Translators' Revolution

Published in 2022, Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution is a speculative novel by R.F. Kuang. Kuang is the author of the Nebula-nominated series The Poppy War and the subject of viral buzz on BookTok, the literature-focused stream on the social media platform TikTok. Set during an alternate timeline in which translation from one language to another is a kind of magic that can be stored in silver, the novel is a story about four Oxford students who confront their complicity in British imperialism.

R.F. Kuang uses dark academia conventions and insights from anti-colonialist struggle to create a world in which the colonized win one battle against the British Empire using magic. The plot and diverse characters make the novel a counter-narrative to works of speculative fiction that never question their characters’ whiteness or the political context that produces such whiteness.

Other works by this author include Yellowface and The Burning God.

This guide is based on the 2022 Harper Voyager print edition and maintains the novel’s British English spellings in quotations.

Content Warning: The source material features depictions of gender-based violence, child abuse, racial violence, and torture. Racial slurs and stereotypical representations of Chinese people are also included in the novel. In keeping with the 1800s setting, Kuang uses place names assigned by colonizers. Those place names are preserved in this guide for the sake of clarity and because they reinforce Kuang’s focus on language and colonialism. The modern names are included on the first mention of each place name.

Plot Summary

It is 1833 in Canton, China (present-day Guangzhou). Richard Lovell, an important official in the British Empire, retrieves a little boy from the room where his mother and family died of cholera. The boy is also ill, but Lovell heals him using the magic of translation. No translation is exact; the mismatch between a word and the English translation creates magic that is stored in silver bars. Lovell and silversmiths like him use these bars to do magic like healing a sick person. Lovell strips the boy of his Cantonese identity by having him create an English name—Robin Swift—and taking him away from his homeland.

Once in England, Robin receives a rigorous education in Greek and Latin. He watches with curiosity as important men come and go to discuss the politics and governance of the British Empire. Robin learns from a guest’s chance remark that he is Lovell’s son and that there was another boy much like him in the past. This relationship doesn’t buy Robin understanding from his father: Lovell severely injures Robin by beating him with a poker after he shows up late for a lesson with a language tutor. Lovell explains that the beating is insurance against laziness—a racist stereotype of Chinese people that Lovell takes to be true.

Robin meets the challenges of his education and enrolls in the University of Oxford at the Royal Institute of Translators. The tower where the college is located is popularly known as “Babel.” In the Old Testament of the Christian bible, humans lost the ability to speak one language as punishment for building Babel, a tower that could reach the heavens. Robin is admitted with the most diverse cohort ever to attend Babel—Ramy, a native of India; Victoire, a native of Haiti and immigrant from France; and Letty, a white, British woman who is at Oxford against the wishes of her father, an admiral. Robin grows close with his cohort, but he also experiences racism and xenophobia, including violent threats. During preterm, he and Ramy escape violence from a group of students who are angry when they see Ramy wearing the same Oxford robes as them.

Robin’s early days at Oxford take a turn when he helps a young man who looks exactly like him use a silver bar to disappear during a silver heist. The double turns out to be Griffin Harley, Robin’s half-brother by Lovell and a former student at Babel. Griffin left Babel because he could not retain enough of his native language to do silverwork and because he learned that silversmithing drives the industry and military might that gives Great Britain power over its colonies. Its silver comes from mines in the Americas and is extracted using enslaved people’s labor. Griffin recruits Robin to help the Hermes Society, a secret group devoted to destroying the British Empire. Robin is reluctant at first, but Richard Lovell’s disrespectful talk about his mother convinces him to help. Robin initially just opens Babel’s magically warded doors to help Hermes members steal silver. He is terrified at first because he values his secure life as a Babel student, but he soon becomes accustomed to playing a double role. Robin is injured after he begins stealing silver himself and quits because the risk of being caught is too great.

As Robin enters his third year at Babel, his friendship with his cohort is both a source of support in Babel’s pressure-cooker atmosphere and a source of tension. Robin, Ramy, and Victoire struggle with the other students’ racism and xenophobia, but Letty is too caught up in her struggles with sexism to sympathize with them. Victoire also has to deal with multiple types of oppression. This conflict comes to a head at a college ball when male students try to force the two women to show them their breasts so they can compare the colors. Letty centers herself as the victim and is also upset that Ramy doesn’t reciprocate her love for him.

The friendship is never the same after that. The apparent death of Anthony Ribben, an upperclassman and one of the few other students of color, casts a pall. More conflict comes when Robin discovers Victoire and Ramy are also members of Hermes. He takes the blame when Playfair, the headmaster, almost catches them stealing silver. Richard Lovell saves Robin from punishment, and Babel sends Robin and his cohort on a surprise mission to do translation and interpretation work. The empire is negotiating a trade treaty with China. Great Britain pays for many Chinese goods using silver. The only thing China wants from Great Britain is opium, so British silver frequently stays in China for lack of trade opportunities. Robin blows up the treaty talks by telling the Chinese negotiator that the British do not see Chinese people as human, making a mutually satisfactory treaty impossible. The Chinese authorities destroy all the opium at the port, and Robin and the others leave quickly to avoid violence.

Robin kills Lovell during a confrontation over Lovell’s racism and treatment of Robin’s mother. Ramy, Victoire, and Letty help him cover up the murder and dump Lovell’s body into the ocean. They try to return to England as if nothing happened, but the school and authorities discover their crime within a week. Anthony Ribben, who faked his death so he could go underground, rescues them and takes them to the Hermes Society headquarters. Letty doesn’t want to lose her place at Babel. She feels uncomfortable with what she sees as unjustified violence, so she turns them in. During the raid on the Hermes Society’s secret headquarters, she kills Ramy.

Robin and Victoire go into hiding and later take over Babel to demand that the empire stop using silver to oppress people. They release people who don’t support them, leaving just six allies to help them. Their occupation prevents the maintenance of silver-enhanced projects, ultimately resulting in the fall of Westminster Bridge. The collapse kills many and hardens the government's response to what is now a revolution. Letty shows up and convinces them they can either surrender or die once the army moves in. Robin refuses to surrender. He gives Victoire his blessing to escape and continue living. He uses a translation spell to make all the silver in England useless but he dies in the process. Victoire makes her way to the Americas to rally other branches of the Hermes Society.