A Decent into the Hellscape of Academia – The Guardian Review
The more academia has broken your heart, the more you’ll love RF Kuang’s new novel. Katabasis knows the slow grind of postgrad precarity: the endless grant grubbing and essay marking; the thesis chapters drafted, redrafted and quietly ignored by a supervisor who can’t be bothered to read – let alone reply to – an email. Living semester to semester, pay shrinking, workload metastasizing. Katabasis knows how it feels to spend your best thinking years doing grunt work to further someone else’s ideas, clinging to the bottom rung of a ladder you will never be allowed to climb: less an ivory tower than a pyramid scheme.
Academia is a hellscape; Katabasis just makes it literal. The author’s sixth novel is an infernal twist on the campus farce. Which is to say, Kuang isn’t subtle. She doesn’t allude; she indicts. Some structures are so intractable, she argues – so insidiously self-replicating – they can only be disrupted with blunt force. But she also knows that a joke can deliver the same hard clarity as rage; sometimes more. She doesn’t pull her punches, or her punchlines.
In Katabasis, hell is not a roiling pit of fire, it’s worse: “Hell is a campus.” Cambridge postgrads Alice Law and Peter Murdoch are here on a quest. They’re searching for their thesis supervisor, the recently deceased Professor Jacob Grimes. The victim of a grisly lab accident, Grimes has exploded, and not just in rage. His body is in bits, and his soul is in the queue for judgment. Without him, Alice and Peter’s academic futures are equally damned. Their plan is simple: sneak into the underworld and haul him back. It worked so well for Orpheus.
This is the 1980s: post-structuralism is eating meaning and theory is eating itself. Our dauntless duo are scholars in “analytic magick”, an archaic and volatile branch of the humanities where philosophy is actually useful: “Magick taunts physics and makes her cry”. There’s special chalk involved this time, some algebra and pentagrams. Once again, it’s best not to think too hard about it. Just surrender to the conceit.
The real dark magic in this book is self-delusion. As Alice and Peter wander the “eight courts of hell” (Dante was mostly right), they come to realize how deeply they’ve internalized the extractive logic of the academy. They’ve been taught to mistake rivalry for strength, exploitation for meritocracy, privilege for prestige, and endurance for resilience. To thank the system that feeds on them. The lie was so simple: you can be the exception, if you’re willing to be exceptional. And it was Grimes – rapacious, scornful and addicted to his own myth – who made them believe it. The quest to save him begins to curdle, but old allegiances run deep.
Scathing about the institution, faithful to the ideal: Kuang is a campus novelist to the core. Katabasis is a celebration of “the acrobatics of thought”. A tale of poets and storytellers, thinkers and theorists, art-makers and cultural sorcerers. It jostles with in-jokes, from the Nash equilibrium to Escher’s impossible staircase; Lacan to Lembas bread. This is a novel that believes in ideas – just not the cages we build for them.
Katabasis turns away from the allure of heroic sacrifice toward something far harder: survival. It doesn’t ask what we’re willing to die for, but what keeps us here – the oldest and most obstinate of our philosophical questions, and the most beautiful. The novel is far from perfect. There’s a pair of blood-drunk villains who feel like a gory distraction, and a nonsense MacGuffin. Bone creatures clatter through plot holes. Grand mythologies collide and compete. Chunks of the novel read like a smarty-pants comedy sketch. And the 1980s faculty politics look deceptively – or perhaps wearily – like our own. But none of that really matters – especially if you have a score to settle.
The heretical glee of this novel is irrepressible. I escaped from my PhD 14 years ago, and it really did feel like an escape; it still does. This book reminded me why. It also reminded me how it felt to ascend from a hell of my own making and not look back. I read Katabasis in a single sitting and then slept the deep, unburdened sleep of someone who’d never even heard of Foucault.
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The Kirkus Review – Katabasis
A Ph.D. candidate in Analytical Magick tackles a new academic challenge: rescuing her advisor from Hell.
Alice Law is about to complete her graduate program at Cambridge under the auspices of Jacob Grimes, one of the foremost Magick scholars in the world. There’s just one problem: A spell gone wrong has led to Grimes’ sudden demise, and it may have been her fault.
Alice feels bad about that, plus she needs Grimes to approve her dissertation and help her get a job, so she starts researching ways to travel to Hell. Her plans are interrupted by Peter Murdoch, one of Grimes' other students—"He was simply born brilliant…Alice couldn't stand him"—and she reluctantly agrees to join forces. Despite the accounts of Dante and the like, Hell is full of surprises, including (sometimes) a remarkable resemblance to a college campus. As Alice and Peter journey deeper, they encounter nefarious deities; twisted, once-human enemies; and Shades from Grimes’ past with their own agendas.
Hell will test Alice and Peter in ways their academic careers have not, dredging up their pasts at Cambridge, their messy relationships with their advisor, and their distrust of each other—after all, academia is a cutthroat game. The stakes are high, with mortal souls on the line, as Alice grapples with the question of whether academia even matters.
Kuang melds a fantasy adventure (don’t look too closely at the magic—that’s not the point) with a rumination on academia’s problems to create a new take on the journey through the underworld. Alice is deeply flawed but also deeply understandable, stuck in a system that damages her while making questionable choices that feed into the same system; this is a tightly constructed novel that aims a clear lens on academia, with both its faults and its virtues. The heady draw of discovery is ever-present, even if what Alice is discovering is Hell.
A learned, literary manifesto on academia—and its darkness.
NPR: Six Questions with RF Kuang
Interview by Emiko Tamagawa
RF Kuang’s fantasy novel “Katabasis” centers around Alice and Peter, two graduate students who study magic at Cambridge University. When their thesis advisor dies, they decide to go to hell to rescue him.
We’re used to magic being like in the “Harry Potter” books, a wondrous gift. The study of magic that you have in the book is grim and difficult, full of hard study.
“I’m an academic, so I like to approach magic not as this neat, easy thing that you can instantly control, but rather as a plausibly real field of study that you can kind of figure out and do research at and experiment with and get better at, but nobody ever has all the right answers.
“In ‘Katabasis,’ I have this magic system that is built on logic paradoxes, so it takes a lot of dogged determinism and years of research, which might lead to nowhere. And they are Ph.D. students. I wanted to capture [that] kind of hopeless but dogged life of searching for the grain of sand that is a diamond in the rust.”
Academia is a world that you’ve spent a lot of time in. How much of you is in Alice?
“Quite a lot. I mean, I’m delusional. She’s delusional … I would probably go to hell for my adviser, but because I actually like her. I think with all of my main characters, they have these pieces of my heart, but I always try to keep that critical distance like a certain shield so that the character is obviously not me and not dealing with the same problems that I am.
“So I wouldn’t say that Alice’s particular problems and her experiences are identical to mine, but Alice feels betrayed by her own mind for a lot of the book. When I started the novel, I did too, and the reason why the prose is kind of jarred and chaotic and it’s crammed with references that feel like they’re about to spill over and just explode, that’s because that’s what living in her mind is like, and what living in my mind was like. So yeah, it was actually a very helpful thing to narrate the world as Alice saw it and as I was seeing it to kind of control that thought process and put it [on] paper so that it didn’t overwhelm me.”
We have to talk about Peter. He’s based on your husband, Bennett Eckert-Kuang?
“Yeah, guilty. I mean, there are important differences. Actually, this is really embarrassing. I’ve just been writing a version of the same character in all of my books. They’re like kind of gangly nerd men, who snap, and I would tie this to the primal scene of when I was in middle school and saw ‘How to Train Your Dragon’ and fell in love with Hiccup.
“And then I started dating the real-life version of Hiccup, and I realized I just love this person so much. I love his goofiness. I love his intellect. I love his way of looking at the world as like a chess problem, and I always write characters from a place of love. So when I was coming up with the other half of the Alice character, this, you know, their dynamic rivalry duo, I was like, ‘What are all the hottest things about a person?’ And I think one of the first lines that described Peter is he looked like he had worn a retainer in his childhood.”
You say to write all these characters from the point of love. But there is that thesis advisor, a man with this amazing academic reputation, but as the book goes on, you start to wonder, “You’re going to hell for this guy?” Is there something in him that you’ve come across in your many forays into academia?
“Yeah, I’m really interested in the myth of the male genius in academia, and I’m also really interested in the cult of the abusive teacher. And there are lots of them in academia, and I’m interested in why students choose to keep learning from them and choose to stay with them. And I wonder if anybody’s seen the Damien Chazelle film ‘Whiplash?’
“It’s about a drumming student played by Miles Teller and his just horrifically abusive music teacher, who is cruel and abusive on an emotional, physical, psychological level. And Miles Teller’s character keeps coming back to him, and I’m interested in that mentality because I have felt it too, the idea that actually this is what greatness demands and then the really corrupted logic of ‘Oh, it’s a compliment to me, it means I’m special that this person would choose me to abuse instead of everybody else.’
“So I am exploring Alice’s and Peter’s really fraught entanglement with their thesis advisor who they both hate on a visceral level, but also adore and would follow to hell and there’s a point at which they have an honest conversation about what they’ve both suffered at his hands and they laugh it off and they’re like, ‘yes, but we’re still going to go get him’ and I used the line that they felt like foot soldiers to a cause that they weren’t even sure they believe in, but it’s too late to turn back.”
Alice is Asian, but it’s very casually mentioned; it only comes up a few times in the book. I’ve read so many books where Asian-ness is central; in “Katabasis,” it was not, but it was there.
“Yeah, I did want to approach her background with a light touch and linger on the aspects of her that she felt were important. I’m actually really frustrated when people are like, ‘Wow, how brave and progressive of you to choose to write about a woman of color.’
“When I was writing the ‘Poppy War’ trilogy, I was like, I’ve never personally been white, so that would have been way harder for me to do, I think. And I get a lot of questions of the vein like, ‘why do you choose to center marginalized characters,’ but that seems like the wrong question because the defaults should not be, you can only write about a white male character and any choice otherwise is really experimental and pushing the bounds of craft.
“This is also related to why when I write characters with a certain identity, I try not to do it in this virtuous representational checkbox way because that’s not true to anybody’s lived experience. I just write nuanced characters whose backgrounds mean that they move through the world in ways that are different from their peers, and then those differences are interesting when they come into friction.”
When you finish a book, do you really leave it behind?
“I think so. I’m in a really different place in my life than I was when I started writing ‘Katabasis.’ I go to therapy now! And Bennett, my husband, is also doing a lot better.
“We’ve really come out the other end of that tunnel. It’s actually strange and painful to go back and reread parts of the book and realize like how dark things were for me at that time, and I think I just have a lot of gratitude that I get to look back at this with hindsight that we made it through that period.”
Rebecca F. Kuang is a Marshall Scholar, translator, and award-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Poppy War trilogy and Babel: An Arcane History, among others. She has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford; she is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale.