Katabasis by RF Kuang review: 'an end-of-term comedy revue stretched to five acts'
Following a pair of postgraduate students as they descend into the underworld, RF Kuang’s latest novel doesn’t seem to know who its target audience is, writes Stuart Kelly
I don’t really know what YA means. Does the “young” merely denote the length of time a person as been an adult, or does it carry an implicit value judgement? Are these novels for people who are only beginners at being adults, and therefore deserve to be cut some slack? The Office for National Statistics says 18-24, whereas the Scottish Book Trust says 12-18. Judicially, politically, psychologically, emotionally and aesthetically, the idea of “young adult” is fraught to the point of meaningless. In some ways, this instability explains why Katabasis is a novel that does not seem to know what it is or who it is for. It veers between aligning itself with discreetly cerebral books like Russell Hoban’s The Mouse and his Child and Norman Juster’s The Phantom Tolbooth and the more flustered Twilight books by Stefanie Meyer or Lauren Roberts’ Powerless romantasies. Kuang has suggested the novel started as a throwaway line about post-graduate studies being hell – literalised in the novel. It is a quip writ large, an end-of-term comedy revue stretched to five acts.
Katabasis is a technical term for a literary descent into the underworld, sometimes considered an integral part of an epic. It is there in The Odyssey and The Aeneid, and is self-consciously invoked in Dante and Milton. It is taken rather more seriously in Father Arnall’s sermon in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In terms of tone, Kuang’s is perhaps closer the bookish satire version in The Frogs by Aristophanes. Closer still, and a far better book though slightly dated, is Giles Goat-Boy by John Barth, in which “campus fiction” takes in the Cold War, the Gospels, Freud, the Three Billy Goats Gruff and a whole translation of Oedipus Rex as “Taliped Decanus” - and invents hypertext decades before the web.
The journey in Katabasis is undertaken by Alice Law, a Chinese-American student of magic at Cambridge, who is responsible for the death of her tutor, the rather imperious Professor Grimes. She is accompanied, to her chagrin, by her one-time friend and rival for Grimes’ approval, Peter Murdoch. While Alice has specialised in linguistic magic, Peter is a mathematical sorcerer, and both want to resurrect Grimes to obtain his professional benediction. Predicably enough, the sparks flying between them are suppressed ardour as much as supernatural lightning: the word “fancy” and “fantasy” are closely linked. Equally predictably, since they are in the underworld, part of the quest means learning that Grimes was a wrong ‘un, but not knowing quite which flavour of villain, hence searching through circles of desire, greed, cruelty and pride. (It’s surprising, in my experience, there are no specific areas in this academic inferno for laziness, incompetence or pettiness).
Again, as you might expect, the name “Alice” is hardly picked on a whim. There is a Carrollian element to the logical puzzles and paradoxes that underpin Kuang’s conception of magic. As she writes: “Linguistic trickery, logical conundrums, it all worked. All you had to do was find a set of premises that, even if just for a split second, made the world seem other than what it really was”. Kuang has some fun with the sorites paradox (how many hairs do you have to lose before becoming undeniably bald?), Zeno’s arrow, set theory, the Prisoner’s Dilemma and such like. Personally, I prefer Granny Weatherwax’s Headology in Terry Pratchett’s books as a twist on magic.
This being hell, there have to be monsters. Kuang has a smattering, including an arachnid Weaver Girl, an “Escher Trap”, a take on bodies patchworked out of corpse parts and skeletal bone-things. Curiously, none seem particularly awful. They all might be imagined as plush toys or Funko Pop! dolls. The descriptions and denizens are multi-cultural: although there is a river Lethe, Alice and Peter are heading to the palace of King Yama, there is room for Ramanujan and a rather cutesy reference to Setiya (presumably Kieran). The reincarnation is as much Nietzsche and Pythagoras as the Buddha. Oddly, there is little Judeao-Christian; a nod to Lazarus and a reference to the Harrowing of Hell (from the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus). There’s not much evil in this Tophet. Certainly, although there are nods away from the Eurocentric, there is nothing as concentrated or significant as the role of the Opium Wars in Kuang’s Babel (a far better novel, and one with the chutzpah to dare a minor key ending).
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The question of audience perplexes throughout. At one point Alice is forgetting “Jakobson, Lacan, Deleuze, Guattari”: is the reader expected to know these theoreticians or would “Bogle, Forgan, Hagan, Pitt-Watson” be just as meaningful? As for the “recommended age”: at one point Kuang is coy – “Peter had to pee, and Alice had to do the other thing” (an aside: this seems the only time either need to in the book) – but later is blatant – “There were Shades fellating dogs”. A reader need not know that the closing line – “to rebehold the stars” – is a riff on Dante, but the reader who does know gets little out of it other than “oh, that’s a riff on Dante”: it’s not as if the characters have earned the celestial vision. The author’s note singles out Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons but does little with the moral implications of his proposition (for example, smoking is inexcusably harming a future possible person).
Yellowface struck me as being too cautious and insufficiently sarcastic, but it allowed Kuang to do what she wished. At its best, Katabasis is a jeu d’esprit; at worst, a mere frolic of her own.
Katabasis, by RF Kuang, Harper Voyager, £22. RF Kuang is appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 24 August.
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