A core theme worth exploring, obscured by lacklustre storytelling and the inability to trust the audience even one tiny bit
Before I get into the meat of this review, I want to talk a little about localisation of books, specifically for the US market. It's not a new topic - authors like Sascha Stronach and Emily Tesh have both publically discussed their experiences of this impacting their own works - but it is a persistent one, and one that absolutely plagues R. F. Kuang's new novel Katabasis.
The novel is set in a university in the UK - Cambridge, specifically - and the main character is a PhD student at the very same. And yet, within the first two paragraphs, I counted six errors in terminology/process for something in such a setting. US and UK academic terminology are bogglingly different, and so I'm used to ignoring the odd few in reading US published books set in non-US settings. It just comes with the territory. But as the first chapter of Katabasis went on, the sheer volume of them was kind of impressive. Nearly every bit of terminology that applies to the academic setting either of the UK or of Cambridge specifically was got wrong*. And it was this consistency that brings me to an assumption - that this is an editorial decision, rather than a set of authorial snafus, especially as I know Kuang has studied in the UK, and her previous academia-centred novel Babel is much, much better on the terminological accuracy front.
If it is editorial localisation... I then have to wonder why? Is there a belief that using non-US terminology will make the book inaccessible to its US market? If so... I would like to hope that's untrue. Coming from the not-US as I do, I know first hand how easily we as a set of reading cultures have adapted to US-specific references. Baffling and nonsensical** as they are, you learn to remember what a sophomore is, what "Greek" means in a university - sorry, college - context, and an array of other tidbits of cultural richness that don't exist elsewhere. Clearly, readers of all sorts are fully willing and capable of adapting to this kind of vocabulary shift (even leaving aside that we're SFF readers who pick up a whole new set of neologisms half the time we read a book). And yet, this kind of USification persists. I assume that publishers know what they're doing and want to make money, so I have to believe based on those priors that there is a benefit to doing all of this, but even so... it frustrates me to no end.
And you might say, what's a bit of terminology among friends? Why does it matter if the person in charge of her PhD is an advisor, not a supervisor, or that she's doing a dissertation instead of a thesis? On the face of it, I would agree, it is a kind of silliness to get all het up about it when the core concepts are still being transmitted and understood, and perhaps even that localising this way means those concepts are better understood by their majority market. But to this I would say - the terminology is just the tip of the iceberg. It's an easy thing to spot. But it signals deeper, more fundamental problems, all of which build to an overarching attitude issue - the need for curiosity and willingness to understand things on their own terms, to see the world as the varied and multiple thing it is, rather than needing it to be condensed into the narrowness of a single understanding.
It says: the world can only be understood through the lens of the USA, and the dominant culture there. Where I might be spotting it in terminology, who's to say there isn't more and deeper in how the work views that world? It certainly comes up in enough works that deal with race outside of the US, because there is a wide gulf in how that topic is tackled in different cultures. Or where works centralise a Christian view of the world. As a process, it stakes a claim to a default from which other things deviate, and that should be a pernicious and discomforting thing to read, no matter where you're from.
And, yes, very simply as someone from outside that default... it rankles. I'm being shown an uncanny valley version of a thing I know so very well, and that's just unpleasant. Not only is it signalling that the things I know about are only worth including when adapted to US understanding (as an aesthetic that can be tweaked, rather than a real place out in the world), but also just that I, as an audience member for this work, am less worthy of consideration than the market it's being adapted to.
Which is a lot to pile onto a bunch of terminological inaccuracies in one book, but it isn't just one book. This is part of a pattern. And when it's a book like this, which has been released with a heap of anticipation and fanfare, it matters all the more. R. F. Kuang's work is the sort of thing the publishers are expecting to rake in the cash, getting the big marketing push all in the run up to release, and so what we see here, I think, very clearly signals what publishing thinks matters, and what will make them money. If that's "make sure a US audience never has to think about things in terms other than the ones they already know"... god help us all.
With that all being said - and inseparable from the work, because the text is not purely a story an author has come up with, but the product of all the decisions that went into creating the final version I get into my hands and brain - let's get onto this as a story object.
Katabasis follows Alice Law, who is (at some point in the late eighties to early nineties***) midway through her PhD in Analytic Magick at the University of Cambridge, under the... direction... of Professor Jacob Grimes, one of the brightest and most controversial lights in the field. Grimes is notable for the excellence of his work, especially the work he did during WW2, but also for the high failure rate of his students, and the intensity of his expectations and approach with them. He is a tyrant, and known for it, but a name that can open doors and make or break careers. More importantly, however, is the fact that he is currently dead. In order to have him open those doors and make that career that Alice so desperately wants, she has to head down to Hell and try to fetch him back. Unfortunately, her fellow student (and academic rival) Peter has had exactly the same idea.
Together, they head into an Underworld not trodden by magicians in the recent past, armed with research of a swathe of texts going back through the academic highlights of centuries all the way past the Ancient Greeks into the Hittites and Egyptians. They must use their knowledge and intelligence to try to navigate the Hell they think they know to find Grimes and bring him back, no matter the cost to them.
Through those reminisces, and their interactions, Kuang attempts to critique the idea of the genius, as well as to undercut the allure of academia by highlighting the physical and mental costs suffered by those trying to enter it, using the magic of the story (which is powered by paradoxes) to highlight the flawed thinking and uncomfortable cognitive dissonance needed to struggle through everything academia, and Grimes as its avatar, throw at them. I say "attempts", because I'm not at all sure the book succeeds either at this, or, perhaps more so, in the necessary twin aim of telling a story that engages you as a narrative object.
To tackle the thematic issues first, there are two complementary issues at work in this book. The first - Kuang seems unable to have any thematic feature of the story that she does not explain in plain, straight up text. There is very little show, no imply, no suggest. Instead, everything is laid out in clear, unambiguous language for the reader. In small doses, this can be fine, and even welcome. It's a tactic that was there plentifully in her previous novel Babel (which I enjoyed). But where in Babel it tended to be relegated to footnotes, here she just whacks it straight into the middle of the text. That alone would shift how it feels, and certainly curtail the stalling effect on the flow of the prose, but where in Babel it overshadowed the earlier part of the text and then receded, here it is omnipresent and obstructively lingering.
Which links in nicely to the second issue - Kuang dwells. On everything. Features of geography, vignettes from a character's past, little nuggets of maths or logic or literature (we'll come back to this) that turn up all over and, indeed, on those thematic explanations. The cumulative effect is of a book that cannot, on any level, let the reader get it themself, whatever "it" might be, which ultimately builds into something patronising and condescending. I found myself muttering "just get on with it" no end of times, because I wasn't getting anything from the lingering. In another book, I might not be so impatient, but that straight up, uncomplicated language for every single thing being spelled out means there's no value in the dwelling; it exists to convey a point, and once the point is conveyed there's nothing of joy to extract. I don't revel in any of the descriptions. The vignettes don't give me a deeper sense of the person. They serve, each, their single purpose and overstay their welcome, continuing on and on through the whole, not particularly short, book.
It feels, on the whole, rather more like a lecture than a story, and a lecture pitched fairly low at that.
While predominantly the reviews of Katabasis and Babel I've seen have been glowing, there is one thread that occurs in common in the negative ones, and it is one I will pick up on too: it feels like Kuang simply does not trust the reader, at any point. We can talk about how justified this may or may not be (and invoke some of the clanger discussions people had about Babel in which they demonstrated that they absolutely did not get it), but I almost think that doesn't matter. This is dark academia - intended to be in the original sense, a book that looks at what academia is and highlights the darkness inherent in it by playing it up. Satire. Caricature. And the problem with both of those approaches to themes is that there will always be someone who misses it. That is just inherent in satire, because of the way it plays with ideas. So if you try to write to avoid that, to make your point so abundantly, simplistically clear that no one could possibly ever miss what you were trying to say... it stops being satirical, because the satire needs the playfulness between ideas, rather than overt explanation. The inability to trust in the reader has cost Kuang the very essence of what she's trying to do.
Which is also a problem that comes up in another of her approaches.
To step back slightly, in the run up to its publication, I saw a number of early readers (predominantly but not exclusively on TikTok) providing reading lists of books one might read to better understand Katabasis. Those lists unsurprisingly contained a fair chunk of Renaissance and Classical literature that touched on the Underworld and journeys there (your Dantes and your Virgils, your primers of Greek mythology), alongside a grab bag of philosophy from Socrates all the way up to the 20th century. I had the slightly unkind thought that some of these readers were doing a speed run recreation of the traditional "western canon". But for all my amusement at the approach, it did make me interested in what Kuang was going to be doing - if those early readers thought reading those texts would bring greater insights into Katabasis, I wondered, how thoughtfully, how interestingly is Kuang engaging with the ideas those texts present.
She's not. I could talk around it, and phrase it more nicely, but she's not. Oh she namedrops them, don't get me wrong. And she cherry picks concepts or motifs from a goodly number. But every single goddamn time, she will explain why that thing matters in plain prose immediately afterwards, to the extent that the text reference itself no longer really serves a purpose except to say "I have read this".
Now, obviously, most of these moments happen in character. It is Alice (and Peter) who are dropping names. Surely, these two characters are doing it because this is the shibboleth they both have, the language they both speak, as people immersed in the study of all these tracts of magic and philosophy and logic and mathematics? These are PhD students! But they don't sound like any PhD student I've ever met. The way they talk about the texts, even the ones that become a little more plot crucial at various points, is horribly surface level, if it even goes that far. They came across to me, more than anything, as insecure first year undergraduates dropping names as a desperate bid to peacock their intellect, and undercut every time one of them - or the narrative - makes everybody pause to check in with the class that they understood what was being discussed and were there any follow up questions?
The whole premise that Kuang is trying to attack rests on - as Alice says, in plain text a number of times - the idea that these students are running a horrible gauntlet for the promise of a prize at the end. That prize might be prestige, or it might be the time and funds to pursue the study that they so desperately crave (Alice falls more into this bucket, though not entirely). As PhD students, Alice and Peter have already run a fair chunk of that gauntlet. They are already immersed in this world, its languages and its pitfalls. They may be more familiar with the darker side of things (oh they are), but they are also the ones who wanted or believed or craved hard enough the allure of the thing at the end. The balance, and the crux of the story, is whether the cost is worth it for that final prize, and indeed whether the prize even exists, or is a rotten, poisoned facsimile of the shining apple it appears to be. But for that to work, you need to sell the dream that these two have bought into. We need to understand what it was they were striving for, why it sold itself to them. At the start of the story, and long before, they both thought the prize was good and worth it, and that they would, in this horrible process, become the knowledgeable, clever, incisive people who could get to it.
By failing to present them as that, by failing to create even a whiff of the alluring intellectual bubble that is the overt sheen of academia that hides the rot underneath that forms the "dark" half of the equation, Kuang fails at the first hurdle. By then cramming her book full of those references, by creating all these lists of names and works, all these famous texts from the traditional (and much critiqued) canon, she's falling into the trap of the very thing she's trying to undercut. Those creators with their reading lists show us that. Read these works, they say, and know the code to Kuang. Except there is nothing to decode. None of it is necessary. You could take out those names, the sassing of Heraclitus**** and the grumbling about Dante, and the text would be the same, because she doesn't effectively use them to craft this semblance of academic glamour in the first place. The thought that kept occurring to me as I read was that this was all surface, and no substance. There are facts and names and works, but none of the connecting tissue necessary to make them all feel valuable as a coherent unit, or to sell us on the very critical idea that Alice and Peter are really very very clever.
Before I seem to be suggesting that this is a failure on every possible point, a pause. There is, under all the not particularly good writing, the core of something... if not quite good then perhaps promising. There are moments when Alice is introspecting, when Alice is examining how much she wants academia and everything she's willing to give up to get it, that approach what dark academia can do well (even if the thing she aims for is never really sold to the reader). There's one moment around half way through, where she describes drunk, giddy, silly grad students being playful with their topic, and that feels right and true, like a moment that could have happened, and would have had the effect it does in the story... but the infrequency of those moments just underscores how flat and un-right the rest of the book feels.There's an essence. But it is no more than that wisp, ephemeral, and lost under the drudge of the story apparatus.
It suggests that, underneath it all, she does get it. Her Alice and that drive for academia. Or perhaps just a very particular sort of person (given how Alice does seem to rhyme quite well with some of the characters in Babel). But getting it isn't enough. You have to make a story out of it, something that works on a sentence by sentence level, on a plot and theme level, that coheres from the granular up to the macro, rather than trading on glamour and the wisps of ideas, and these brief moments of having looked at the world and caught something real as a butterfly in your fingers. It needs to be a story, and it's there it truly fails, far more than any inaccuracy or overexplanation.
Some of that is the plain and overburdened writing I've already mentioned. But there are other key flaws. Despite that core of something true, neither of her primary characters manage to feel interesting and worth following for the majority of the time with them. Alice is introspective, but when that introspection doesn't yield substantial character depth, it just begins to feel self-important rather than worthwhile. And, more to the point, she's just not all that interesting to spend time with. Peter, whom we only see through her eyes, begins as the caricature man from seemingly all of dark academia, who comes from privilege and is easily both attractive and intelligent, and who sails through the academic world with ease in contrast to the heroine's grit and struggle. There are glimmers that he might have something more to him, but those don't resolve until fairly late in the story, and then, because of the way the narrative turns out, his development just gets dropped for a whole section, and only resolved in part by the end. Their chemistry is nearly non-existant. Even their rivalry - which is absolutely critical to the resolution of the story - feels flat and empty.
And when it comes to plotting... it's not so much that Kuang loves a bit of foreshadowing as that she signals with effusive clarity what's coming, unfailingly. There's no tension and no twists. Another victim of that plain and over-explaining style. If it evokes anything, it might be horrible inevitability, but even that implies a management of the story direction that I think might be undeserved. It's just... a sequence of events, with heavy telegraphing of the following steps, such that you must, like her characters, trudge through the wide expanse of grey sand to get to where you want to go (the ending).
Which is... a let down. If you're going to skewer academia, I think you need to do a better job of it than "the power of love" with a bit of vengeance sprinkled on for spicy seasoning.
But maybe the magic system will save it? The translation magic was one of Babel's most interesting points, no? Well... not really. There's actually a lot of similarities in how magic is described in both books. Where for Babel there's a spark that comes in the frisson between words that can't easily be translated, that cognitive texture, in Katabasis, Kuang is playing with the idea of paradox, and has her magicians need to be able to hold conflicting ideas in their head at the same time to essentially put one over on physics. The two ideas aren't the same, but they feel like they approach similar theoretical ground from slightly different angles, and so some of the sheen is worn off the paradox magic. I'll admit, I also just have less time for being walked through formal logic problems than I do for discussions of linguistics. But there's just much less time given over to exploring it as a potentially fascinating idea than perhaps it could have merited. Instead, there's much more lingering on the practicalities, the chalk and the blood and research. Which makes sense in a Watsonian sense, but from a Doylist perspective makes for much drier reading. Once again, there's a possible core of something fascinating here being let down by the connective tissue of storytelling.
And that's my main takes on this book - I just think it's a story told badly, in a number of the key ways in which a story can be told. The prose styling is weak, the plotting unexciting, the tension nonexistent and the characters insufficient to carry the load left for them. All of which then fails to present in a coherent and persuasive way that thematic core. Yes, by the end, she has absolutely conveyed the "academia can really suck and many of the ways in which it sucks are baked into the structures of it". But she's conveyed it by just straight up telling us that. It may work as an idea being passed from author to reader, but it fails at every step on an intuitive level, because she cannot for a moment let it be free of that urge to explain. To tell this story in an emotively effective way, it needed freedom, and showing, and a trust that we could follow into the (frankly not particularly intellectually difficult) territory she was leading us to. A book does not need to be able to be for everyone perfectly and without friction. In removing the friction, she has removed what might have made it a story at all.
Between this, and the fact that none of it was ever allowed to be itself in the first place, but instead translated to be more easily consumable by a specific audience, what's left is something hollow and insubstantial. Both the author and the editorial direction needed to have faith that a reader could do even a tiny amount of work for the story that this was trying to be to work. They both needed to assume anything but the worst and least of their audience. Neither of them did. And so it all falls flat, perpetuating some of the very problems that it theoretically seeks to condemn, and telling the audience in distressingly plain language how little it thinks of them.
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* The vast majority are indeed switching Cambridge/UK terms for US ones, but a small few are actually switching Cambridge specific ones for Oxford specific ones. Those... I struggle to account for, given the author did a year at both universities. Maybe Oxford just sticks harder in her memory.
**I say this tongue in cheek, but child me did take ages to internalise the freshman/sophomore/junior/senior thing.
*** This isn't specified, but can be dated via events referenced in the text. I suspect the events of the story are taking place in 1991, but it could go a year or two either way.
**** She is very briefly very dismissive of him, because like many of the pre-Socratic philosophers he presents some ideas which, now, look absolutely batshit. But what she fails to mention in her mockery of him is that he, and the other pre-Socratics, were working from first principles to try to understand the universe, and they paved the way for the more accessible later works like Aristotle. Shoulders of giants and all that. No Heraclitus sass here.
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The Math
Nerd Coefficient: 3/10
Reference: R. F. Kuang, Katabasis [HarperVoyager, 2025].
POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social
