Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Old Fezziwig" data-source="post: 9327548" data-attributes="member: 59">I finished Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution this afternoon.&nbsp; I found the prose charming and couldn't put it down.&nbsp; Robin Swift is a clever echo of the Dickensian orphan heroes, dialed up to eleven.&nbsp; He's clever and likable while being monstrously selfish and self-righteous.&nbsp; Unlike Pip or David Copperfield, I'm not entirely sure that he's grown by the end of the novel, and his certainty in the correctness of his actions at the end is unpleasant.&nbsp; But I also found it to be enormously frustrating.&nbsp; Kuang's treatment of her conclusions is kind of facile, and I had a sense that she was kind of begging the question a bit.&nbsp; I agree with her premises, but found the conclusions jarring.&nbsp; She mirrors the isolation of the Babblers in her presentation of the setting to the audience (we're as removed from the outside world as they are), which is clever structurally but undermines the climax of the novel and some of the conclusions the characters come to.&nbsp; I'm assuming that this is in part because she's concerned with being too didactic or polemical or engaging in misery porn, but the book ends up feeling didactic and polemical because it mostly ends up just telling the audience that things are fubar.&nbsp; I don't think that's wrong, but it didn't work for me.&nbsp; My other quibble was that, for a novel set in 1830s England, there was a weird sense of modernity to the prose.&nbsp; One character refers to a &quot;narco-military state&quot; and another carries a &quot;messenger bag,&quot; which both felt like very contemporary phrases.&nbsp; Finally, I also felt like it was derivative — we've seen these sorts of stories before recently (there are echoes of Harry Potter, The Magicians, and Jonathan Strange &amp; Mr Norrell) and cynical — the violence of the conclusion is presented as inevitable.&nbsp; Which may be true, but is also very depressing.&nbsp; So many modern books and films suggest that there's no problem too large to be solved with sufficient explosives.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Old Fezziwig, post: 9327548, member: 59"] I finished [I][I]Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution [/I][/I]this afternoon. I found the prose charming and couldn't put it down. Robin Swift is a clever echo of the Dickensian orphan heroes, dialed up to eleven. He's clever and likable while being monstrously selfish and self-righteous. Unlike Pip or David Copperfield, I'm not entirely sure that he's grown by the end of the novel, and his certainty in the correctness of his actions at the end is unpleasant. But I also found it to be enormously frustrating. Kuang's treatment of her conclusions is kind of facile, and I had a sense that she was kind of begging the question a bit. I agree with her premises, but found the conclusions jarring. She mirrors the isolation of the Babblers in her presentation of the setting to the audience (we're as removed from the outside world as they are), which is clever structurally but undermines the climax of the novel and some of the conclusions the characters come to. I'm assuming that this is in part because she's concerned with being too didactic or polemical or engaging in misery porn, but the book ends up feeling didactic and polemical because it mostly ends up just telling the audience that things are fubar. I don't think that's wrong, but it didn't work for me. My other quibble was that, for a novel set in 1830s England, there was a weird sense of modernity to the prose. One character refers to a "narco-military state" and another carries a "messenger bag," which both felt like very contemporary phrases. Finally, I also felt like it was derivative — we've seen these sorts of stories before recently (there are echoes of [I]Harry Potter[/I], [I]The Magicians[/I], and [I]Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell[/I]) and cynical — the violence of the conclusion is presented as inevitable. Which may be true, but is also very depressing. So many modern books and films suggest that there's no problem too large to be solved with sufficient explosives. [/QUOTE]

Verification