This post follows the previous review I’ve done. I decided to make a review full of spoilers, as there is much to say about this wonderful (and heavy) standalone.
If you didn’t read this book, stop right here and come back when you did it. And if you absolutely want to read a review about this book, here is a spoiler-free one.
Before starting, here are some content warnings to know before starting this book: violence, colonialism, sexism, racism, racism slurs, war, and slavery. Don’t tell me that I didn’t warn you.
Alert Spoilers
The book doesn’t start well as you have your first death, Robin’s mom, and then after his recovery, he is asked to erase who he is and be a new person, like who asks that to a child. Be another person, as I’m not too fond of one part of you. I will make you a perfect British guy so you can enter the best school in Oxford as you can speak a different language as much as English. I will make you learn Latin and Greek, but you need to follow those courses and never miss one or I will make you feel like you’re not a real British who will beat you. Oh, and by the way, I’m your dad, but you can’t say it and tell anyone even if you know it. I hated professor Lovell since the beginning.
It continues like that, as well as coming back from the library where he went to fetch his friend Ramy’s notebook, he is involved in stealing silver bars (I will talk about it later), and he sees his doppelgänger. A little after, he discovers that that guy is his half-brother that lived the exact same life as him. Well yeah, Robin reads, sleeps, and studies in the same conditions as his older brother, Griffin. The only difference is that one follows the survival rule, and the other decides to stop everything and enter Hermes. This secret society wants the destruction of the inequities and the empire. During the story, you feel that they are just objects for Lovell and can be replaceable at any moment, feeling confirmed by himself.
To disappear, Griffin decides to fake his death. He isn’t the only one as Anthony, part of Hermes, is also doing it during his travel to a colony. At some point, I tried to guess who was dead and who had faked it. However, it shows that Babel isn’t a safe place for anyone. As Robin decided to help Hermes in the robberies, I was convinced Professor Playfair knew about it from the beginning and didn’t trust the cohort. A thing that I hoped wasn’t true as he is a furious man who likes to kill people and use the Babel tower ward to do it. After some robbery, Robin is shoot when he wants to go out of the library, so he decides to stop working for Hermes, especially since he knows literary nothing about it.
After that, everything goes back to normal or at least a normal Babel, like expelling a student as he doesn’t have good grades and doing that in front of the whole school and in a theatrical way by smashing his blood vial on the floor. I think it’s humiliating enough to be dragged out of the tower by two of his colleagues in front of everyone; there’s no need to be that dramatic. After that, it’s time for the cohort to pass some tests and the revision sessions are so true; in the end, you don’t know anything anymore, and the pressure you have, the author makes it so accurate, it’s like you are passing those tests.
Can we talk about the soirée they attended even if only Letty wanted to go? I was so mad at her for that, like when three people tell you no and explain why maybe go by yourself or don’t.
The cards start to be revealed by everyone; Ramy and Victoire are members of Hermes, and Professor Lovell begins to understand that Robin isn’t the mindless boy he thinks he is. After being saved by Robin, the cohort is sent to China for the problem of opium and completely stops trade. It’s simple: the British want to have control of China and more silver, so they decide to send some opium and make people dependent on it. However, the government isn’t happy and stops all the ships from stopping in their harbour. Robin has the role of translator for Mr Baylis. Despite that, Commissioner Lin, their interlocutor, has all the correct assertions and makes Mr Baylis look like a child, which was so funny to read.
As the situation goes down to hell, they decide to send back the cohort and professor Lovell to Britain. During one of the fights between father and son, he still hasn’t really told him; Robin kills the professor with a silver bar, the one that his brother used to kill a person. However, this time he said nothing but the want was there, and that did the silver work. First, I had a little joy dancing to it; second, it shows that silver bars can be more dangerous between some hands than they think. After the cohort hides the corpse by drawing him, they arrive in Britain and directly go to Lovell’s manor. There they find some papers confirming that the meeting with Commissioner Lim aims to create a reason to start a war.
Back in Oxford, Robin meets Lovell’s “real” family, this moment is so sad, as you know that he is dead, and he has two small children, Robin’s half-siblings, and the “dad” by the little one, oh my god. Our dear Playfair knows that something happened during the journey and wants to frame them. Hence, he decides to trick them by saying he is a Hermes member, but he fails miserably, like how can you do that?!
Now we are attacking the worse part of the book: the escape and the end. After being and living with Hermes members for some time, Letty betrays them all. Why not protect a friend who kills someone but not when it comes to destroying my country. Yeah! She betrayed them, but she also killed Ramy, and I’m furious.
It seemed to defy the laws of physics that Ramie Rafi Mirza could be silenced by something so tiny as a bullet. (Robin)
After the betrayal, the arrest, because, yeah, everything continues, especially when you encounter someone like Sterling. He had a little problem with Griffin and used Robin for his vengeance. In the end, he is killed by Griffin, who helps Robin and Victoire to escape, but Griffin is hurt and then shot point blank by a guard. Obviously, in front of Robin, who was hidden, and saw the third person he likes to get killed in front of him. Like, duh, obviously, death is searching for him; I can’t think of another explanation.
A little after, they invade Babel tower and want to use it as a hostage. For that, they are helped by Professor Chakravarti, who is part of Hermes. Also, some students stayed and another Professor.
Faces of colour, faces from the colonies, except for Professor Craft. (Robin)
From this moment and with all the events that happened, Robin will go madder and madder as we are nearer to the ending. He is helped by some people with the strike but loses Professor Chakravarti as he goes too far for him. Before the end, he has the last discussion with Victoire, where they talk about everything and nothing from their three years in Babel.
Be selfish, he whispered. Be brave. (Robin)
To end the Babel problem, he decided to destroy it with silver bars and the word translation, as it’s a word that can’t translate itself. The downside of it is that it will kill anyone who does it, as you don’t have time to go out of the tower. Four people decide to sacrifice themselves, including Robin, and the most beautiful paragraph ever is here. We are following his thoughts about languages and translation as he meets death again.
Silver bars and translation
Now it’s time to talk about silver and its consequences for an entire Empire.
Silver and translation are crucial in this book. In the first part, we see from the first pages that it’s a silver bar that helps Robin to survive against cholera that kills his mother. However, until his first class and the robbery at Babel, we don’t know much about silver as we follow Robin in his different language courses.
Once the discovery of silver is made and the way it is linked to translation, you understand that it’s a powerful element that can help and/or destroy an Empire. The book contains an essential part about the empire’s geo-politico-economic side, which makes the story even more real. Also, it shows that silver is vital daily but also between countries.
Silver is the base of the British Empire, which used it for everything. It can be cars, machinery, buildings, fabrics, everything. All of that makes this empire the most powerful in the world. It wants to stay like that (and be more than that), so they want to be able to use the stock of China, as they import tea and pay it with silver bars and sadly gives China tons of them. They need them back as they start to have a shortage in their country.
The solution is for them easy give opium and control them thanks to the dependence people develop on this drug. However, China isn’t happy about it and refuses any more ships in its harbours. So to solve that problem, they sent a translator who spoke mandarin, which is Robin, and here comes one of my favourite scenes of the book, the meeting between Mr Baylis, just a big ah* who thinks he is more important than he is, and that I just want dead, and the Commissioner Lin, who is a person who knows shit and knows how to express an opinion. One of them only wants war because it’s how you show your power, apparently.
After that encounter, we understand a lot that Babel isn’t only a place where language is used to translate, but it’s also a place of control; not only silver but speak is only one way. So you need to do everything for the British Empire, and if it means making some missteps on a contract with another government, not a problem.
However, when it’s used against its own people, even if it’s to “help” them, you have a ton of economic problems for the population, lower wages, unemployment, injuries, and ultimately death, but do the rich people care? No! And the last few chapters show it. Different buildings are destroyed as their maintenance isn’t done or is on the point of being done. The most visual and troubling is the Westminster Bridge, and the politics function as if nothing happened. I was so shocked by it that people died as Robin was destroying the links between the silver and Babel; they don’t have another regrouping of links and silvers due to a battle between Oxford and Cambridge, but nothing is done. I was baffled!!
A character’s portrait
To finish this big post, I want to talk about a character that I disliked at the beginning and hated at the end, like how she could do that; HOW! This character is Letty, one of the cohort.
I found her insufferable initially, but she was an interesting and complex character. She appears like a girl that comes from the high sphere of the empire (her father is an admiral) with the only problem of being a woman, but she isn’t like that at all, or more, there are two Letty.
Cold, blunt, severe: all the words one might use to describe a girl who demanded from the world the same things a man would. (Letty)
As you learn more about her past, you discover that she was jealous and resentful of her brother as he was a man with all the opportunities. Still, he completely destroyed them with parties and alcohol when he entered Oxford. The consequence of it was his death. So she tries to show her father that she can maybe take her brother’s role as she is literally better than him. Still, as society doesn’t ask anything from women except for a good marriage and giving birth to the heir, he refuses.
Then she has done everything possible to enter the only school that accepts women, Babel. It was hard for her as she understood that the other three of the cohort had a link she would never have as she is a British citizen, and they were all taken up from their motherland. But also, for her, they have all the world at their feet, so I feel it’s kind of a betrayal that the three of them just want to destroy everything.
She doesn’t care about the racism, the slurs or behaviours that people can have toward Victoire, Ramy, and Robin, which makes her forget that Victoire is also a woman who also lives on top of the racism.
Her friends were always going on about the discrimination they faced as foreigners, but why didn’t anyone care that Oxford was equally cruel to women? (Letty)
She would never have understood that as she had never been deported or lived as an enslaved person, someone could be her master because she was the mistress and her reality was different for herIt’s’sherIt’s’s better to stay in this one rather than see the horrible reality of what an Empire really means. Moreover, if it means killing people that are her friends, so be it.
[…] they had reminded her why she’d abandoned them, which was that she could never really, properly, be one of them. And Letty, if she could not belong to a place, would rather tear the whole thing down. (Robin)
Here is the end of this long spoiler rambling about one of my favourite books of the year. Tell me if you like it or put 📚 in the comment.
Liz.
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