This is an incredible piece of work. The author says it is her most ambitious work yet, and I agree. I thought The Poppy War was pretty good--this book amazed me with Kuang's command of writing and the way it kept me turning pages through a very long volume. In a year where so many of the award-nominated books seem to have very little depth, and that's on purpose, this one goes all out. I come away from reading the novel and the comments of other readers much smarter than I was before.
The book is meticulously set in Oxford, England in the 1830s. The author spends a lot of effort on getting the details right, except for planting the tower of Babel in the middle of Oxford and having silver magic being the driving force behind the Industrial Revolution and colonialism of the time. A spot-on critique of this work is that the power of silver, which would pull it in the direction of a kind of fantasy cyberpunk, instead changes nothing at all--except maybe to create a single point of failure for the British Empire.
The setting is early 19th century Oxford but in every other way the book reads as something written today, with 2021 understanding of racial issues (Not gender. I think Kuang was aware of how much shoehorning it would have taken to include it in some affirming way). So it's not going to be a classic, and is best read as a novel of its time. That time is pretty dark. The protagonists of the story are taken as children from their countries and presented with a life of ivory tower (literally) privilege with no awareness of any other choice. That bubble is broken early on and the description of the shattering process is gripping. The colonialists will never let go of their privilege, and will destroy everything to keep it or at least deny it of other lesser beings.
Britain did release the Jewel in the Crown (India) through the mostly nonviolent resistance led by Ghandi, but there's no hint of that Britain here. The white men of privilege are uniformly vicious and ruthless. The book is in no way subtle. Pretty much a club all the way through. I align with its conclusions on systemic racism but it's fairly recent that this perspective has come to the fore in racial justice. Previous generations of reformers for the most part repeatedly asked for equal treatment by the oppressors unless they were forthright Marxists.
It's a good book, and well worth reading. The expositions on translation are lengthy but never boring, so you come away learning something new. I think the setting held Kuang back. She knows the setting and culture like the back of her hand (degrees from Oxford and Cambridge, studying at Yale) but this turns into a trap. It is a work worthy of deep reading and critique, which is a great achievement in this time when we so desperately want to turn away from what is expressed here.
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