Katabasis (Kuang)

ahhhhh I have so. many. conflicting feelings about this book. I spent the first, oh, two-thirds being actually kind of angry at it, because I could see that it was so close to being a good book and yet it didn't quite hit the mark for me... although also, though it didn't actually hit the mark it was still a book that I was snarfing through when I should have been doing Hugo reading, so it clearly still had a lot going for it. Then I spent the last third really liking it, to my surprise.

The idea is awesome. In a Magick AU of Cambridge, Alice's celebrity magick thesis advisor, Professor Grimes, dies. Alice is responsible through negligence, plus which she needs her advisor to write her recommendation letters and get her a tenure-track position, so she goes to Hell to rescue him. Her fellow student, Peter (everyone in my family felt he should have been named Bob, or at least Robert, but I suppose that would have been Too Much), comes with her at the last moment.

(I told D. about this book and his first reaction was, "The author is clearly a grad student." Of course Kuang is.)

The grad school part, and Hell as academia: this conceit was just brilliant and I loved it a lot. The execution varied, but I will say that Dis as a dissertation writing group was, I thought, completely awesome and hilarious! Magic academia is a mix in this book of kind of fun and hilarious but also kind of "but would it actually work that way?" Alice is a magician who seems to do magic based on historical research with a giant dose of philosophy. Bob -- I mean Peter -- is a magician who seems to do magic based on logic and mathematics. Like, okay, both of them sort of overlap in the philosophy realm, but it makes zero sense to me that both of them would be working with the same advisor. How does that even work? I did love that magic was bound up so much with paradoxes and what you could bring yourself to believe (and details such as that Alice could get out via the paradox of the Unexpected Hanging but Peter could not, because she could be confused by it, while he's a mathematician who knows how to resolve it so he couldn't be "fooled" by it).

I think the real issue I had with this book was one of character consistency. For example, we get this reveal about Alice a third of the way through the book that should have strongly informed everything about her characterization up to that point. I can see vague pointers to it but not the sort of strong characterization I would have expected.

Spoilers

That is to say, Grimes having cut the pentagram in Alice's skin to give her perfect recall should have meant that from the very beginning she should have had extremely acute memory and also an extremely acute sense of things that she can't forget but wishes she could. The latter is vaguely alluded to as anxiety a couple of times, but like... I literally flipped to a random page near the beginning and got this: "She did not recall any archival information about queuing to depart Asphodel -- Orpheus and all the rest seemed to just walk right into the courts --" If she has perfect memory, she shouldn't be thinking so tentatively! She should be much more confident about it! I should have had no doubt that she had a superlative memory by the time that reveal drops, and I had no idea.

The worst offender is Professor Grimes. I felt like I got whiplash because sometimes it was like he was supposed to be plausibly not terrible (while still being terrible inside), and then it would be like "haha, no, just kidding, he is the WORST" in such a way that he was like a caricature of evil thesis advisors.

Spoilers

When the pentagram thing came up, I quite liked it -- it seemed clear to me that it was a non-sexual and potentially non-gendered stand-in for sexual harassment in the way that it violates her bodily autonomy in a way that depends on very dubious consent with power dynamics -- and that would have been fascinating to explore, especially if Grimes had been painted as an interestingly flawed person in power who went too far and didn't admit it -- but then, nope, we get the actual sexual harassment / attempted rape with Alice (as well as another woman from the department), and then also for an encore he steals Peter's work, because why not, and in neither case is there any plausible deniability at all, just "yeah, this is just because I am Evil Thesis Advisor."

Alice's view of Grimes also flip-flops constantly, seemingly without any awareness either from her or any other character that it's doing so. One chapter she'll be all "I hated him, I just wanted to bring him back to life so I could torture him," and a couple of chapters later she'll be like, "I just wanted him to be proud of me." Now, I'm not saying those reactions can't coexist, clearly they can, but any individual reaction always seems to be treated in the moment like The One True Reaction. In the first two-thirds of the book, when she hates him, she never really thinks about any of her positive or conflicted feelings, and when she's feeling like she wants him to be proud of her, she isn't channeling any of the hate. And whoever she is with latches on to whatever she's thinking in that chapter, as if that's the only thing she's ever thought. Kuang clearly, in retrospect, meant for it to be more of a nuanced viewpoint rather than a flip-flop, but I definitely experienced it while reading as a flip-flop.

On Peter: I'd been spoiled for the reveal of what's going on with him, and it didn't bother me as much as I'd thought it would.

Spoilers

Peter turns out to have Crohn's disease, plus a Childhood Trauma where he hated people feeling sorry for him so he never told anyone he had Crohn's, so no one knew that's why he was disappearing for months and also he was sometimes very distant with people because of it. I didn't get the sense that he wasn't still brilliant, but it was hard for him sometimes to get anything done when he was in pain and he had to work hard to make up for it afterwards (yeah, fair), and sometimes he glossed over how hard he had to work in general (also fair, this seems to be a thing that happens).

One of the things I thought was odd about this book was how much Kuang seems not to actually care about hell, which was surprising given that, y'know, the whole conceit of the book is, well, hell. We get a long description of the first level, Pride (+), a pretty short description of the second level, Desire, we skip the third one entirely (Greed, I think), the fourth one (Wrath) gets pre-empted by a trap, fifth, sixth, and seventh (Violence, Cruelty, Tyranny) are so short (maybe a page each) that I almost missed them. I mean, it's OK with me (I always preferred Purgatory anyway), but it just seems odd.

But the last third of the book did a lot to reconcile me to everything. It turns out Kuang and the novel do not care much about the levels of Hell because it wasn't about that, it was about the people we met on the way, and also about the last Court of Hell, and facing what you fear. And Alice does, in fact, finally have both the feelings of "I want you to approve of me" and "I want to destroy you" (though even here the two reactions seem curiously divorced from each other). I still felt rather as if Grimes was a caricature of Evil Thesis Advisor. I would have preferred him to be humanly evil, though I can see why that would be hard to do in this novel, because in the end the whole point is that it's not about him, not in the slightest; it's about Alice, it's about Elspeth, about even Gradus and the Kripkes. It's about the different ways to -- I won't call it redemption, because the book doesn't deal in that sort of thing, not really -- to be human. To be more human, which may in the end turn out to be the same (thematically, at least) as emerging from Hell.

(+) One more thing: I imagine this is a niche view, and because I know this, by itself it wouldn't have sunk the book, though I do think it speaks to a certain viewpoint, but gosh this one thing irked me for the first two thirds so much. Soooo... in this AU, all the journeys to the underworld in literature are literally that, as you might imagine. And Dante, of course, is the master of journey-to-the-underworld Western literature, so he is namechecked quite a bit. And the thing is, Dante is my boy, and every time Dante came up in the first two-thirds I would kind of writhe a little.

Dante! and the last line

The circle of pride is NOT first in hell (although I did find that segment of the book, with prideful scholars, rather amusing), and it is absolutely not next to "desire," which Kuang correctly states is a quite light sin. Pride is the most fundamental terrace in Purgatory, because Pride is the most fundamental sin, the one that takes us farthest from God. Also: Dante never said heresy is the deepest circle of hell, wtf!! Dante was WAY more sophisticated than you would think from Kuang! (It's possible that this was AU!Dante, but I would absolutely have needed more to have convinced me of this.)

That being said. Once we got to the city of Dis, it was all right, because Kuang clearly put a lot of thought into Dis and what it meant, and it just lands absolutely right for me. And then, and then! the last line is, And together they emerged, to rebehold the stars. And. It turns out I am easy: if you just evoke e quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle to me, if you show me that you understand that of Dante, I will forgive you all manner of sins. Which -- learning to move beyond pettiness-- I suppose is the point of both hell in the book, and the book as a whole, so... this response of mine is thematic, I suppose?

So... yeah. If I'd read this in 2025 I would have nominated it for the Hugos (and I definitely would have voted for it over Everlasting or Raven Scholar, and probably some other ones too). But I still wish that the first two-thirds had been a little... less... irritating? In any case I think I come down on really liking it, in the end, on the strength of that last third, though certainly with reservations, and a big part of me still wishes for a book that engaged with Dante in ways this book was clearly not interested in doing. (For instance, it would have been very interesting to me if pride had been a big deal, and Grimes had got caught in that, with his other sins really being unmasked as sins of pride. And Alice too! But anyway!)

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From:

cenozoicsynapsid

I love academic books, and I like Dante as well, but I've never liked anything by Kuang, so I didn't read this. I don't think your review has changed my mind. I found Kuang's other words unsubtle and condescending--- I've compared Babel unfavorably to Amitav Ghosh's Ibis trilogy and to A Memory Called Empire. It's a very black-and-white picture of what imperialism is like, and what the people who build empires are like and think about one another, and what communication and language do within the imperial framework. And Kuang will leave you with the impression that China, before the Century of Humiliation, had had neither linguists nor imperialists--- though of course it had both.

I also thought The Poppy War derived a lot of its intended impact from the reader knowing nothing about Chinese history or literature.

Your comment that the Evil Advisor is just evil, for no reason, makes total sense to me in this framework. Kuang doesn't have what the theoreticians call a "critique of power"; she just hates it. *Of course* the powerful are evil; *of course* they do the vicious and exploitative things they do out of purely evil motivations. Why wouldn't they? (And it's always Them, not Us.)

Edited Date: 2026-07-25 08:19 pm (UTC)

From:

cahn

Ha, I'm glad my review didn't change your mind. It's the kind of book where I did end up liking it, but I could have very easily ended up not liking it at least as much as I do like it, if I were a slightly different person. (And I do think that you wouldn't like it.)

And yeah, if you like Dante, you should not read this :P :) The whole Dante thing just made me want to beat my head against the wall for an awfully long time (Kuang, did you seriously not read two-thirds of the fundamental text your novel is based on?? because it looks very much like that), and I freely admit that I was won over only because one really doesn't have to do very much at all (clearly) to win me over where Dante is concerned.

The academic-book-ness of it was interesting, because sometimes I did feel like it was hilarious, but never in a way that I really was drawn in by it in some sort of deeper sense -- in contrast, I was rereading bits of Possession the other day, and that's a book that really is academic both in style and in philosophy.

I found Kuang's other words unsubtle and condescending

Yep! That's fair! I am not going to read Babel, which I'm very sure I'll dislike. I didn't finish Yellowface. I did like The Poppy War (though not enough to read the sequels), though yeah, I knew nothing about Chinese history or literature, so.

I think the fact that the Evil Advisor was offscreen for most of the book worked in its favor, honestly. But... yeah. He is Evil just Because, as far as I can tell.

From:

aella_irene

I was minuting discussions of academic authorship guidance for work, and the thing that struck me was the majority of the senior academics being convinced that the real threat was students getting authorship to which they weren't 'entitled', instead of junior academics not being adequately credited for their work. For example, X wrote the paper but Y did all the data crunching, and deserves credit for that. (The exceptions were two women, who argued the others down very well when someone said 'it's not even a problem'). If Grimes had been that sort of academic, it sounds like it might have worked very well.

Katabasis (Kuang)

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