RF KUANG

Magic words: the writer of The Poppy War tells us about her new novel

- Jonathan Wright

THERE ARE THOSE WHO FALL HARD FOR Oxford. And there are those whose feelings are more ambivalent. While she’s an Oxford graduate who earlier this year returned to the city of dreaming spires to give the JRR Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature, Rebecca F Kuang falls into the latter category.

“I have a lot of conflicted feelings about Oxford,” she says. “On the one hand, it’s such a beautiful illusion. I think a common theme in many dark academia novels – Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, for example – involves longing and desire to be a part of this beautiful, aesthetic, deeply intellectual world. But the fact of the matter is that that world is only accessible to certain bodies. That’s something I felt acutely when I was at Oxford.”

Not only was Kuang an American abroad but she was also “a woman of colour at an institution that… still hasn’t done very much to reckon with its colonial roots”. The tensions here are front and centre in Kuang’s new novel Babel, a critique of Oxford set in an alternate 19th-century Oxford where the Royal Institute of Translation, aka Babel, is a key institution of empire. Not only is Babel a world centre of translation but it’s a place where lecturers and students practice silver-working, in which silver bars’ magical powers are manifested through translation.

NO SUCH THING AS AN ACCIDENT