Three foreign-born students, two men and one woman, enter
the translation program at Oxford in the 1800s.
They become fast friends as outsiders, along with one native British
student, as they prepare for a career in magic.
Does this sound Harry-Potterish?
It did to me, but this story is much darker, and the magic involves
pairs of words in different languages that are inscribed on silver bars. If etymology is your thing, this is the book
for you, but I just found it tedious after a while. Robin Swift, self-named after his English
biological father snatches him from a cholera epidemic in Canton, China, is the
main character. He and his two best
friends, one from Calcutta and one from Haiti, wrestle with their identity and
struggle for acceptance, despite being native speakers of languages much in
demand in their curriculum. In fact, the
silver bars, housed in an Oxford tower called Babel, basically control
everything in the UK, from the water supply to transportation. When a former student tries to recruit Robin
for clandestine Robin-Hood-like purposes, Robin has to reevaluate his role in a
global power grab. Ultimately, the
question for Robin is whether the end justifies the means and whether he wants
to risk deportation or incarceration. He
also grapples with the question of whether the future that has been laid out
for him is really what he wants or whether he would be happier if he had never
left China. I like the premise, but this
book is just too long, and the final standoff goes on seemingly forever. Also, I do not like footnotes in a work of
fiction, and this novel has tons of them.
They would have driven me even crazier if I had read this on a kindle.
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