In the 1980s, in a world like ours except with magic, Alice Law and Peter Murdoch are both working on their Phd dissertations under the same mentor at the University of Cambridge: the infamous Professor Jacob Grimes, “department chair, Nobel Prize laureate, and twice-elected president of the Royal Academy of Magick.” Alice and Peter both want what they think only Grimes can give them—”the golden recommendation letter that opened every door,” a straight track to tenure, a way to become a professor as lauded as Grimes himself, if not more. The trouble is that Grimes has just exploded in a gruesome accident involving a pentagram that wasn’t chalked up correctly, and is very much dead. So it is up to Alice and Peter (both of whom carry some guilt over Grimes’ accident), to descend into hell and bring Grimes back, so they can get what they need from him. That there is no doubt that Grimes has gone straight to hell should tells you all you need to know about the kind of man he was.
This is the basic premise of R.F. Kuang’s latest novel Katabasis, the title of which is Greek for descent, usually into a hell of the classical variety. Kuang’s hell, the one that Alice and Peter successfully enter (and spend almost the entirety of the novel in), is very much based on the classical idea of hell too, with Dante’s version leading the way. But it is also a multicultural one, with deities from Eastern religions and cultures making their presence felt at times.
“Hell, [Alice] had read, was an inconstant and shifting plane. Its landmarks were conceptual, not fixed… Hell reveals itself to you in whatever order it so chooses.” But the hell Alice and Peter enter is still very much a reflection of the world they have left behind—the world of academia. Hell, it appears, is a high stress university campus, a writer’s market, with “shades” desperately reworking their dissertations, hoping to pass so they can pass on. Like living PhD students, desperate to prove their theories to mentors who didn’t care, the shades/scholars themselves “cared so much, they argued so viciously, but couldn’t they see it didn’t matter, didn’t even remotely register in the cosmic span of things, and that this was the dumbest possible way to spend eternity.”
That’s Kuang’s real take on academia: Is all the suffering really worth it? A lot of Katabasis is satire on the world of academics, and how deeply navel gazing and self-obsessed it can be. It is a matter of life or death to those involved, and utterly meaningless to everyone else. Alice is only able to see this from a slight distance once she is in actual hell; in Cambridge, she and Peter are so caught up in the rat race that they lose all perspective. Katabasis, like Kuang’s last genre novel Babel, is also very much dark academia. Dark as in a critique of high level academics, where at times self-flagellation and sacrifice of basic human needs is romanticised. Alice tells us how she would often starve herself at Cambridge to achieve a sort of light-headed clarity, or how many of the post doc students took no end of abuse from their mentors just because they wanted a shred of their attention.
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Katabasis
Katabasis is also funny, whether intentional or not. It is absurd and barely believable that Alice would give up half her life span to go to hell and bring back a man who made her life miserable, just so she can become a professor, so she can finally be seen as a genius in the field by everyone, so she can (perhaps) feel avenged. That she and Peter think their mistakes, or their desire to be the best, are enough of a reason to risk going to hell is hilarious —their delusion, their guilt, their self-chosen suffering—all seems silly from the outside (and one must assume, to Kuang too, who herself is currently a PhD scholar herself). We are told that working towards a Phd prepares you for “the constant managing of despair… [when] everything was always falling apart; nothing in lab went right; you couldn’t afford groceries, your cottage had a rat problem, all your instructors hated you, you were always one step away from flushing all your lines work down the toilet. You shoved it to the side of your mind and went to sleep and deferred it all to tomorrow when your brain again functioned well enough to pretend.” Hell then, is something Alice and Peter assume they are ready for, but as they work their way through the various courts, they find themselves tested in ways that shake their core beliefs.
Alice, for example, is forced to deal with her suicidal ideations, the tiny voice in the back of her mind that wants her to just give it all up and fade away. Suicide and chronic illness is a concern of Katabasis; Kuang has explained in interviews that her husband’s chronic illness informed parts of Peter’s narrative. Alice, meanwhile, frequently thinks of letting go of life, of being free of memories and what often feels like the unbearable burden of existence to her.
What Alice really loves though, is magic. When she first experiences it, she thinks it is a miracle: “Here was Jesus, turning five loaves and two fish into an endless supply. All the fields she had considered for her major—maths, physics, medicine, history—they all fell away, they seemed to be irrelevant, for why would you study static truths when truth had just exited left?” Magic, and being a magician becomes her sole driving force, once she realises that “everyone else lived in such an ossified world. They simply took the rules given to them. They were interested only in articulating their own limits; they moved about as if in stone. But magicians lived in air, dancing on a tentative staircase of ideas, and it was a source of endless delirium, to know that the instant the world began to bore you, you could snap your fingers, and you’d be in free fall again.”
The magic—or “magick”—system in the book is based on paradoxes; special chalk is needed to draw pentagrams, which are needed for all spells. Kuang goes off into multiple fussy tangents explaining a whole bunch of the intellectual theory behind it all, and these can be dense and not always necessary. In fact, it’s probably best not to pay too much attention or get distracted by them, because they don’t add much to the plot. Rather, it adds to the somewhat pedantic nature of the narrative. While the narrative is satirical very often, it can grate quite a bit, with its large chunks of exposition and forays into how philosophy, maths, logic, the classics inform the “magick.” It is also a bit tedious, because how many times can a reference to Foucault or Nietzsche actually add value to the story? Maybe Dante, with his version of hell being a major frame of reference for the characters’ journey, is worth bringing up multiple times, but not every name dropped has the same value. Much of the exposition will act as a hurdle in the pacing of the plot, though if anyone is able to pick up and absorb new information quickly, it is fantasy readers, and Kuang does have a very large existing fan base accustomed to her highly intellectualised storytelling, odd Macguffins, and slight plot holes.
For the most part, Kuang’s storytelling tends to be very readable. The third act of Katabasis picks up really well. There are some great action scenes, where Alice has to really break her sense of self down into the most base, bare-boned version of who and what she is, in order to survive hell. And she does—whether it is snorting chalk like cocaine, or wearing the skeleton of an animal as armour, Alice does what it takes to really dig deep into herself and survive, for herself. Not for accolades or a job or for her mentor, but to be who she finally sees she can be. There is a strong case for Jungian psychology thrown in for the denouement, as Alice, at her lowest, has to face her a version of her shadow self, tear it apart, take what she can from it to make her way back to the world of the living and really live.
Katabasis is attempting to be many things, but at its core, it is a campus novel about two PhD scholars at Cambridge who choose to go to hell—actual literal hell—rather than have an honest conversation with their university admin. R.F. Kuang has written multiple bestsellers and award winners across genres. She’s barely 30. She seems unstoppable. Katabasis sold to Amazon for Prime Video before it was even published. That it will have a massive audience waiting for it is undeniable. Whether it will be equally loved by all is questionable.
Katabasis is published by Harper Voyager.
OMG- I loved Babel, and I can’t wait to get my hot little hands on this! As an academic, I can completely relate to the idea that you might go through literal HELL to finish your thesis.
Ouch.
Shades – ha – of Philip Terry’s Inferno set at Essex University.