By Marielle Seche
Trigger Warnings: Suicide, Sexual Assault, Abuse
“KATABASIS, noun, Ancient Greek: The story of a hero’s descent to the underworld.”
R. F. Kuang’s latest book, Katabasis, is a dark academia fantasy novel that follows two Cambridge graduate students of magick: Alice Law and Peter Murdoch. They use their magical knowledge to journey into Hell to retrieve the soul of their professor and academic advisor, Jacob Grimes—whom they may have accidentally killed. With what’s left of the late professor’s body quickly decomposing, time is of the essence. Their goal is to go to Hell, retrieve the professor’s soul, and somehow convince King Yama, Lord of the Underworld, to let them back into the land of the living. From the get-go they run into problems; their anchor to Professor Grimes’ soul leads them astray, their magick chalk doesn’t seem to work in Hell, and a murderous pack of reanimated skeletons is stalking them through the courts of Hell and making the already harrowing journey deadly. Add in Hell’s ever-changing landscape, and the duo quickly realize that they may be in over their heads. Will Alice be able to trust Peter, her academic rival, and learn to accept help? Is her professor worth the sacrifice? And will Alice figure out that there is life after academia, that there is more to life than magick?
Like Kuang’s novels Yellowface and Babel, Katabasis explores themes of identity, prejudice, control, and how this affects her character’s lives. Alice Law is a Chinese-American graduate student at Cambridge in the 1980s. She’s highly intelligent and ambitious and doesn’t let anything get in the way of her dreams–especially not the tempestuous Professor Jacob Grimes, the top magician in his field and her future advisor. She wants to work under the best, needs to be the best, and if Jacob Grimes has a reputation as difficult to work with, it’s the other students’ fault for not working hard enough. Her undergraduate advisor sees her drive and gently tries to guide her away from her own worst impulses: “Remember there is more at stake than your advisor’s approval. And there’s more to life than magick” (63). Alice scoffs at this platitude; to her, magick is everything, and it’s this idea that eventually leads her on the path to Hell.
The Price
“Hold on,” said Peter. “You do know the price?”
“Half of my remaining lifespan,” she said. “Thirty years of my life or so, gone. I know” (8).
Getting to Hell isn’t the hard part, Alice says, that’s just a matter of research. The reason many magicians haven’t travelled to Hell is that the trip rarely justifies the cost. This is not the case for Peter and Alice. All Alice has ever wanted is to be a magician, and she would rather go out in a “blaze of glory” (8) than fall into irrelevance.
Kuang has written about the rigors and pitfalls of academia before, most notably in Babel. She makes the argument that for high achievers, death is preferable to failure. Alice’s sense of self is so wrapped up in her identity as a magician that she can’t imagine a life for herself outside of it. When she travels to Hell she is desperate, and we later learn that she has been struggling for several months prior. She suffers severe abuse at the hands of her graduate advisor, yet she refuses to see it for what it is, instead brushing it off as his way of pushing her to be a better magician. Just as Alice refuses to consider a life outside of magick, she refuses to admit that Professor Grimes is not a good person or not worth her time—let alone any of her remaining lifespan—and forges ahead.
It’s frustrating to watch these two young students give up so much for a mission that to the reader is so obviously not worth it. Their reasons for this journey seem tenuous enough, but when you learn that not only do they lack a solid plan as to how they are going to return to the land of the living with the professor’s soul, but that they also somehow have to convince the ruler of the underworld, King Yama, to let them leave, you start to wonder about their true motivations.
When Alice and Peter arrive in Hell, they realize that the landscape looks strikingly familiar: “‘Christ,’ says Peter, ‘Hell is a campus’” (77). The landscape spreading before them looks strikingly like the University of Cambridge. Alice realizes that Hell must adapt its conditions to the person, which is why, for Professor Grimes, Hell would appear as the university he’s dedicated his life to. “Hell is a mirror,” (76) Alice says, not yet realizing it is her mirror as well. Cambridge is Peter and Alice’s own Hell on earth, and they just so happened to have travelled to a greyer, stranger version of it.
Alice and Peter meet several characters throughout the book that try to reflect to them what placing too much of your identity in academic glory can lead to. They meet Shades in the Fields of Asphodel and the Pride Court who would rather spend eternity as a shadow of their mortal selves rather than strive for reincarnation at the chance that in their next life, they wouldn’t be magicians. While Peter finds this incredulous, he and Alice are unable to see that by journeying to Hell, they have done something similar.
Suicidal Ideation
“She had trained her whole life to do this one thing and if she could not do it, then she had no reason to live” (13).
This single-minded focus and the high pressure that students face are points that Kuang discusses at length in Babel as well as Katabasis and is the driving force behind every decision Alice makes. Alice seems addicted to the extreme highs and lows of academia. When she first makes it to Hell she feels “a wild, burning elation” because “it had worked, she had done it, it worked” (15). But when Peter lets slip that he has won a prestigious award that Alice had also applied for, she describes feeling a rush of blood to her head and difficulty breathing. While she had hoped to outgrow these extreme reactions, she admits that they have only gotten worse with time.
Alice mentions her own death several times throughout the book—multiple times in just the first few chapters alone—and frequently expresses that excelling in her chosen field is a matter of life and death. Or rather, that if she doesn’t excel, she may as well not live. This casual disregard for her own life seeps into how she treats her body as well. When the accident that ends up killing her professor occurs, she admits that not only was she not in a sound state of mind that day, but she had also barely slept in the past three months and was at the point of collapse. She mentions that most graduate students are chronically overworked and the faculty doesn’t pay it much mind, to the point that students, particularly of Professor Grimes, disappear from the program or die without much fanfare or recognition by the university. The message is clear: perform or cease to exist. No wonder then, when the price to Hell is half of her remaining lifespan, Alice hardly shrugs at the cost and forges ahead.
You would think that once dead this need to perform would fade as well, but for many Shades and former magicians, it is the opposite. They talk about how being dead is the ideal condition for a researcher; no need to worry about bodily needs, unlimited time, and no more worrying about silly things like ethics. Even in death they are unable to separate this need to achieve from their identity and allow themselves to rest. It is only when Alice has truly lost everything—and therefore all hope—that she is freed from the expectations of Grimes, academia, and those which she has put upon herself.
Lessons Learned
“Haven’t you learned, Jacob Grimes?” King Yama’s smile looked demonic beneath his furrowed brows. “Hell has no rules” (528-529).
I have to admit, before I finished this book, I didn’t like it. I was actually very angry at R. F. Kuang and was sure I’d never read another book of hers again. Dramatic, I know, but I was pissed. I had thought that she had done what she’s done before to characters in previous books *ahem, Ramy, ahem* and I was like, Rebecca, you are a sadist. She loves to bring her reader to the edge just to rip away the one positive development in the book and in Alice’s life. However, it ends up okay, there’s a twist at the end that I did not see coming but seems obvious in hindsight. And I admit, it was a necessary evil. I don’t know if anything except for rock bottom could shake Alice awake, and she desperately needed a wake-up call, a shift in priorities. However, we get an inside look into Alice and her relationships, and we begin to understand her bad decisions and why she is the way that she is.
In chapter 20, we learn why Alice was non-functional for the three months leading up to the accident and how everyone in her life failed her, including Peter. A theme that shows up time and again in Kuang’s works is the oppressed siding with the oppressor. In a pretty horrifying way, Alice finds herself in a situation where she goes to someone she thought she could trust and realizes that there is no help to be found. After that meeting, she says, she began “dreaming of dying” (322). She has been abandoned by her advisor, by her only friend, and by the university at large. Alice herself then decides that she too accepts the position in which society has placed her, and attempts to get her professor to accept her again, take her back. But it doesn’t work that way, she has stood up for herself and so she has labelled herself as “other”; she no longer has a place in the workings of the university. At the point in the book when she finally reveals all this to someone else, it is too late, and Alice is alone yet again.
Chapters 24 and on get pretty dark. Alice is in a bad place, she has a lot of regrets, and she falls into a deep depression. She finally realizes that even if she somehow manages to get back to the land of the living, not only has she given up years of her life, but she has actually lost something worth living for, and it’s not magick. With all hope gone, she finally releases the tight leash she has held onto since the beginning of the book, and we see what she is really capable of. Alice is no longer playing by the rules, and by doing so she opens up a realm of new possibilities. Seeing Alice realize her desire to live is heart wrenching and beautiful, and it makes you feel all the more devastated for her. I like Kuang’s books because she doesn’t shy away from tough topics and she doesn’t feel the need to give the reader a happily ever after, yet still resolves her books with a satisfying ending. Kuang is able to immerse the reader in the emotions of the protagonist, and even if you don’t like her, you end up feeling deeply for her. Although a difficult read at times, Katabasis is a true hero’s journey, just not how you would expect. Because sometimes you realize the one who truly needs saving, is yourself.
