Cheap Tricks

In R.F. Kuang’s novel ‘Katabasis,’ two philosopher-magicians wander Hell to rescue their thesis supervisor. Jejunity ensues.

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Katabasis
by R.F. Kuang
Harper Voyager, 560 pp., $32

BEING INTRODUCED TO THE STUDY OF PHILOSOPHY can feel a bit like being initiated into an occult society. There is something destabilizing and wondrous and incantatory about a person’s first experience of something like Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God, which holds, essentially, the following: God is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.” If such a being lacked existence, we could imagine a being still greater for not lacking existence. Because the category of “that which nothing greater. . .” must exist, having existence is an intrinsic feature of the concept of God; therefore, God’s existence is an a priori necessity. Putting things in somewhat contemporary terms, if the concept of God can be coherently formulated, then God’s existence must follow.

The aspiring student may read this and feel torn between competing twin desires to (A) stop studying philosophy, since this argument is so obviously ridiculous that everyone who takes it seriously must be lying or on drugs; and (B) figure out exactly why it doesn’t work, because at first, second, and third blush, they can’t find the problem with its logic. But before they figure out what to do, their philosophy professor tells the class, “of course, Kant disproved this, because he showed that existence is not a predicate,” and they nod sagely along, although they do not know what the hell that means, and then they move on to the next peculiar problem, and the next after that, until by the end of their bachelor’s degree, they and all their friends are making jokes about missing shades of blue and utility monsters, frequently inspiring the people around them to find different seats in the subway car. Such is the power of the discipline: It can create action at a distance.

In R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis, the study of analytic philosophy is literally the study of magick. Alice Law, Kuang’s protagonist, is a postgraduate in Cambridge’s Department of Analytic Magick in the mid-1980s, and she studies everything from “alchemical scribblings of Samarkand to Wittgenstein’s lost notebooks.” Magick comes in many flavors, but in its most standard format, it is powered by paradoxes:

The word paradox comes from two Greek roots: para, meaning “against,” and doxa, meaning “belief.” The trick of magick is to defy, trouble, or, at the very least, dislodge belief. Magick succeeds by casting confusion and doubt. Magick taunts physics and makes her cry.

Classic philosophical and logical paradoxes like the Liar Paradox (“This statement is false”) or the Sorites Paradox (taking one grain of sand away from a heap of sand is never enough to make it stop being a heap, but if you do this over and over again, you will run out of sand) are the uranium fuel pellets powering the book’s magick system. When intoned in the right language and in circles that circumscribe correctly drawn chalk pentagrams, they allow a trained magician to alter reality in a way that pays homage to the invoked problem: The Liar Paradox can trap someone forever. The Sorites Paradox can give you a never-ending quantity of anything (sand, flour, etc.) that arrives in a big, undifferentiated mass. Curry’s Paradox, an exploitation of self-referential conditional statements, can be used to make snap adjustments to the universe, including by instantaneously healing wounds.

This world—of magick tricks that are also jokes about Bertrand Russell—is one that Alice Law departs for hell. Her adviser, Professor Jacob Grimes, has died in a magickal accident that is probably at least partly her fault. So, “for reasons of both moral obligation and self-interest—for without Professor Grimes she had no committee chair, and without a committee chair she could not defend her dissertation, graduate, or apply successfully for a tenure-track job in analytic magick—Alice found it necessary to beg for his life back from King Yama the Merciful, Ruler of the Underworld.”

Alice goes to hell in the company of her love interest and colleague Peter Murdoch, who is the only other person whose academic work is directly supervised by Professor Grimes, a man both famous and famously unpleasant to work for. Dark rumors surround him, though these are usually more of the “terribly mean to his students and colleagues” sort rather than anything of the necromantic variety. Yet Alice and Peter decide it is worth risking their lives and souls to free Grimes from the underworld so that he can supervise their papers.

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WHAT FOLLOWS SHOULD BE A DELIGHTFUL MASH of academic satire, high-concept magickal hijinks, and psychological introspection. Unfortunately, Katabasis only occasionally delivers on the promise of its magnificent premise.

In this way, the novel has much in common with Kuang’s previous five novels, each of which marries an intriguing concept—what if Mao Zedong was a waifish teenage pyromancer (The Poppy War trilogy); what if the British Empire harvested language from its colonies in order to power its magical control over the world (Babel); what if a white author stole a recently deceased Asian friend’s manuscript and passed it off as her own (Yellowface)—to Kuang’s admirable willingness to put her characters through the wringer. Unfortunately, each book gets similarly dragged down by shallow characterization, cheap plot devices (her characters are often forced to pick up the proverbial Idiot Ball in order to push the narrative along), and didactic expositions of the story’s themes and worldbuilding. Taken together, these qualities leave the impression that Kuang imagines her readers to be bright but easily confused children.

The central animating metaphor in Katabasis is simple: academia is hell. Kuang should know: She has a B.A. from Georgetown, master’s degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge, and she is currently working on her Ph.D. at Yale, something she presumably does during breaks from writing bestselling novels. (As of this writing, Kuang is 29; she has apparently spent her entire adult life in academia.)

The underworld of the novel reshapes itself into forms specific and familiar to those who look upon it, so the two academics traveling through it naturally see hell as one vast university campus. The progress of the shades of the dead through Hell’s Eight Courts (Pride, Desire, Greed, and so forth) depends on what’s in their “transcripts”—the most permanent of permanent records, which attest to the sins they struggled most with in life. Graduating from Hell allows a shade to be reincarnated back into real life, but only after first writing a satisfactory dissertation about their life. (Hell is thus home, unsurprisingly, to all ABDs.)

When Katabasis is functioning purely as a satirical vamp on academia, the “academia is hell” bit is entertaining, if somewhat slight. Wandering through the campus library (that is, the Court of Pride), the characters meet various prideful academic sinners:

For instance, that fellow there—he told everyone he taught at Oxford, where really he taught at Oxford Brookes. . . . That one there, he rejected submissions if they hadn’t cited his own work. That one gave eighty-two presentations on Goethe. That one likes to remind folks that Dartmouth is in the Ivy League. And over there—creative writing students. . . . Somehow they always come in groups.

These jokes are cute and amusing in a sort of bargain-basement The Good Place way, but the academic satire portion of Katabasis fades away for huge sections of the text. Despite Hell appearing to them as a university campus, Alice and Peter spend much of their journey clambering up walls of bones that evoke games like DOOM or Hades and wandering through trackless deserts explicitly drawn from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. While the Court of Pride is a library and the Court of Desire is a student center, the Court of Violence is just “a barren desert punctuated by rocks.” What does this have to do with a college campus? Where does it fit into the metaphor?

The fact that the book’s central imaginative conceit falls into obscurity in this way does not mean there is more room for subtlety as a result: The story and characters of Katabasis are presented virtually without subtext or ambiguity. Consider this typically comprehensive account of Alice’s awareness of her professor Grimes’s attraction to her:

She knew he found her attractive. She had noticed too many lingering glances, too many hands on her shoulder that stayed much longer than they should have, to remain in doubt whether her professor would sleep with her if given the chance. This knowledge gave her a twisted sense of power, as long as she didn’t act on it.

Kuang characterizes Grimes as a terrible but also terribly charismatic person who drew both Alice and Peter into his dark orbit. Yet at no point either in the story’s present or in the many flashbacks featuring him does Grimes ever seem magnetic or appealing: His wicked charisma is repeatedly invoked, but never felt. Katabasis seems almost worried that the reader might fall prey to Grimes, and so it refuses to ever depict him in an appealing way. But this makes Peter and Alice seem unbearably naïve and childish: How could either of these two intelligent people have been drawn in by the charms of this petty little man? Didn’t they realize his name was Grimes?

Kuang’s apparent reluctance to trust her readers stymies the entire text; it ultimately conveys a lack of faith in the book itself. The romance between Peter and Alice illustrates the problem: It is entirely perfunctory, at one point even deploying, without a hint of irony or subversive intent, the most tired and constantly mocked Romantasy trope in existence (while camping, they are forced to share a blanket). That there is no chemistry between them makes the reliance on a stock scenario to advance their relationship feel almost contemptuous.

Then, too, although the book purports to be about academics involved in high-level philosopho-magickal research, it is surprisingly reluctant to delve into the philosophy or magick in much detail; the occasional one-paragraph summary of a famous paradox is about as much as we ever get. Presumably Kuang (or, I am tempted to believe, her publisher) doubted a long novel featuring extended discussions of Russell or Wittgenstein would have been very appealing to the average reader.

But there is a long tradition of excellent speculative fiction that engages seriously with philosophy without worrying too much about leaving its readers behind. It’s a high-risk, high-reward category, to be sure: Some of the fiction in this category is dense and confusing and requires some work to get through, and I expect much of it was probably difficult to know how to market. But at the same time, the best works of this kind are also some of the best contributions to the fantasy and science fiction tradition in general. What would Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed or Always Coming Home be without a willingness to trust her readers to keep up with complex ideas? What would Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun have been had he trusted his readers as little as Katabasis does? Samuel R. Delany’s masterful Nevèrÿon series opens each of its chapters with a long quote from a philosopher like Kristeva or Derrida! And I expect Adam Roberts would never have adapted the great works of Kant and Hegel into fascinating and wondrous speculative novels had he believed his readers were going to need to have their hands held constantly along the way.

It’s not a question of whether Kuang knows her stuff. Her book simply seems unwilling to engage with these thinkers and ideas except to provide a bit of intellectual bunting over the windows into the story. This is a peculiar shortcoming, given that the book is about academics who are so obsessively dedicated to the study of philosophy and magick that they are willing to risk their eternal souls in a journey to Hell in order to have the best thesis supervisor.

So it is that instead of being a book for grownups, Katabasis flounders through a shallow stream of underdeveloped ideas while occasionally pointing beyond itself to much weirder and wilder places left unexplored. What is most frustrating is the sense that if Kuang had just trusted both herself and her audience a little more, she could have taken us to see them.