RF KUANG Katabasis. Reviewed by Robert Goodman

The bestselling author of Yellowface returns to dark fantasy with her new novel set amid university life – and Hell.

RF Kuang burst into the global literary scene with her satirical work Yellowface. But for some she was already there, following a debut trilogy of Asian-inspired fantasy novels (Poppy Wars) and a complex, erudite academic fantasy that explored British imperialism and colonialism (Babel). In her latest novel, Katabasis, Kuang returns to dark academic fantasy, but is still very much in the satirical mode of Yellowface (with new targets) and has moved the setting from Oxford to Cambridge.

RF Kuang sets up her world, her protagonist and her dilemma quickly and efficiently. In academic terms, her opening few paragraphs serve as a thesis statement. Alice Law, a postgraduate student at Cambridge, feels obliged ‘for reasons of both moral obligation and self-interest’ to bring back her dead supervisor, Professor Grimes, from Hell (Katabasis is a Greek word that denotes a descent into Hell). Alice is a student of analytic magick, a field of university study, and needs Grimes’s recommendation to secure an academic job.

Kuang does not waste any time, and within about five pages, Alice has gone to Hell. But she has not gone alone. She is joined by fellow graduate student and Grimes advisee Peter Murdoch, who was looking for his own way to get to Hell for slightly similar reasons. Law and Murdoch have history – they have been pitted against each other by Grimes, who, unsurprisingly, was not a particularly nice person. But there is more to it than that, so this trip to Hell may well be a chance for them to reconcile, or at least better understand each other.

One of the delightful conceits of Katabasis is that Alice and Peter have learnt about Hell from people who have ‘sojourned’ there and come back to tell the tale. This includes Dante (The Inferno) and TS Eliot (The Wasteland) but also Chinese, Greek and Egyptian philosophers and storytellers (the story of Orpheus is referenced). This allows Alice and Peter to use these texts as guidebooks. For example, they note this about the River Lethe:

Hell was always bounded by a river. All the sources confirmed this, regardless of period, geography, or religion.

A couple of other aspects of Kuang’s conception of Hell are interesting. The first is that it is not an eternal torment but more a form of purgatory before souls are reincarnated.

The Eight Courts of Hell are not arenas of eternal punishment. For one thing this would be wildly unjust. No sins, no matter how heinous, deserve an eternity of punishment … When it comes to death, the Christians are right about the immortality of the soul but wrong about everything else. The Pythagoreans, the Platonists, the Buddhists and Daoists, the Manicheans, the Jains and Sikhs and Hindus, have a better grasp of things. Living and dying are two sides of the same coin.

The second is that Hell has a hyperbolic geometry, which essentially means that while it feels as if one Court progresses to the next to the next, nothing about Hell is particularly linear.

The other interesting element of this book is the magic system Kuang creates. It is a system based on paradox, or, as Alice puts it: ‘the act of telling lies about the world’. The magic is activated by special chalk, ‘the pulverised shells of those sea creatures that perished millions of years ago’. This magic system allows Kuang and her characters to explore (and explain) a range of well-known paradoxes throughout the story. As with her language-based magic system in Babel, Kuang once again makes the study of magic a particularly academic pursuit.

But it turns out that everyone gets the Hell they deserve – Peter and Alice end up in a Hell that is all too reminiscent of a university campus. So what Kuang actually delivers is a campus novel. She uses her characters and her situation to skewer campus life, the types of people who you might encounter there (particularly those who are likely to end up in Hell) and the trials that academia puts students through. The first Court of Hell, Pride, is represented as a library full of posers and show-offs; the second, Desire, is the student centre. The ultimate layer of Hell, the city of Dis, is where academics strive in a kind of Kafkaesque system to write dissertations about their sins. The centre of this takedown is the relationship between Alice and Grimes, which, through flashbacks, readers come to slowly understand to be terribly toxic and exploitative. Yet it also shapes Alice’s perceptions of what makes a good academic in ways she finds hard to shake.

Despite, or because of, all this layering, Kuang still manages to deliver what is for the most part a compelling story about Alice and Peter. She makes it easy for readers to invest in their quest, even if its motives are all wrong and its ultimate aim is selfish, and they often have to wade through reams of philosophical exposition. Kuang has the pair encounter a range of souls and mystical beings through whom they are either challenged or have their eyes opened to the truth of their world and their lives. And she puts them in a place where they have the ability to finally be honest with each other (and to some extent themselves).

There are a lot of literary references in Katabasis and plenty of philosophy and mathematics that need to be explained, at least to a degree. This aspect, while it will be appealing to some readers, is likely to put others off. Katabasis does have some adventurous elements (Alice particularly gets to be fairly kick-arse towards the end when she has to take on some magicians who have taken to Hell a little too well) but most of Alice’s adventures are of a cerebral nature and even her battles involve decisions about which are the best paradoxes to fuel her magic spells. That said, a life of the mind is what Alice thinks she needs. She reflects that what all postgraduate students want is:

unhampered time and access to the necessary resources to think … This was why she kept at it for years … The whole system could be broken, and it wouldn’t matter. They’d put up with anything, only for the promise of access to that abstract plane.

Readers who loved Yellowface are likely to be surprised by Katabasis but not necessarily put off, given that is driven by a similar kind of acerbic, satirical observational style. Those who loved Babel, however, will not be surprised at all by Kuang’s unique magic system and deep academic cuts. But Katabasis is something different to both of these. Kuang takes centuries of religious thought, philosophy and mathematics, her experiences as a postgraduate student, and a dash of romance, puts them all through the blender of her prodigious imagination and delivers something fresh, fun and thought-provoking.

RF Kuang Katabasis HarperVoyager 2025 PB 400pp $34.99

Robert Goodman is an institutionalised public servant and obsessive reader, who won a science fiction short-story competition very early in his career but has found reviewing a better outlet for his skills. He was a judge of the Ned Kelly Awards for many years and reviews for a number of other publications – see his website: www.pilebythebed.com

You can buy Katabasis from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.

Tags: Babel, campus novels, dark academia, dark fantasy, fantasy, magic, Orpheus, RF | Kuang, TS Eliot, Yellowface