‘Katabasis, noun, Ancient Greek: The story of a hero’s descent to the underworld.’ R.F. Kuang’s latest novel is a promising adventure story full of magic and maths but let down by florid prose.
When Alice Law, an American postgraduate student of ‘Analytic Magick’ at Cambridge, learns of the death of her chauvinist thesis supervisor Professor Grimes, she and her peer, Peter Murdoch, must rescue his soul from the eight courts of hell. Their journey comes with the debt of half a lifetime. But without Grimes, Alice is stuck in academic limbo on Earth, so she must pay this penalty and ‘beg for his life back from King Yama the Merciful, Ruler of the Underworld’.
The hellscape they encounter differs from Dante’s vision. This hell is a campus, where undergraduates ‘worked each other up over the wrong ideas’. Kuang must know the territory well since she has not one or two but three degrees, from Georgetown, Cambridge and Oxford, and will soon have a fourth from Yale. She is clever, really, really clever. You know this because she reminds you on every page. We have maths, philosophy, theorems, literature and poetry. Katabasis is intellectually rich, with theories of reincarnation and eternal recurrence, but feels emotionally hollow.
It is a quest tale that reads like a mash-up of allegorical literature and a children’s story but fails to nail either genre. The topography makes for fun adolescent fiction – a wall of bones, Escher traps, Lethe, gore and monsters. But what teenager is going to have patience with a book full of words such as chthonic, tartarology, timocratic, xiaoren, deneholes, eidolon and manifolds?
Another problem is Kuang’s unlikeable characters. Alice declares early on that ‘she would sacrifice her firstborn for a professorial post. She would sever a limb’. And she overdoes the adjectives: ‘Only the eyes were uniformly unscarred; staring, pleading, plaintive, curious eyes.’
The visual imagery is strong: souls queue for the afterlife as if for a rock concert. And there are some profound ideas: ‘As with many concepts in magick, Lord Yama is defined more by absence of proof than proof itself’ – a neat way to define why atheists will never win in arguments against believers. A nice conceit Kuang explores is that all stories about descent into hell are useless manuals:
Dante’s account was so distracted with spiteful potshots… Orpheus’s notes, already in archaic Greek, were largely in shreds… And Aeneas – well, that was all Roman propaganda.
She shows how a perfect memory is a curse – that in fact ‘humans needed to forget to function’. And of snobbery in academia, she writes: ‘A golden rule is that the more popular one was among the masses, the less valuable one’s research had to be.’ The most profound reflection comes to Alice in Lower Hell, where people must write down the story of their life and crimes, but most people justify their sins. These souls are hooked on the theory of Laplace’s Demon. In simple terms: life happens to them and so they shirk personal responsibility.
Kuang challenges the idea of female complicity in the #MeToo movement; but Alice is so charmless that while you want to kick the offending professor you don’t really care where Alice ends up. Swathes of writing are poetic and lithe. I’m just not sure this is a book for which I’d go to hell and back.
Comments