A profound but puerile ride to hell

With a CV that includes Cambridge, Oxford, and Yale, RF Kuang epitomises that stereotyped Asian overachiever who’s accomplished what few have, and made herself an international personage through her books, particularly Yellowface, which tore masks off the publishing industry. In Katabasis, she labours with the hypothesis: “Hell is a campus.”

Imagine, the Hogwarts lot make it to grad school with wide-eyed wonder, evolved vocabularies and kawaii minds in pursuit of doctoral theses in the field of Magick while their advisor, Nobel Laureate Prof Grimes, manages to combine Snape, Umbridge and Voldemort and still offers villainy trademarked as his own.

Also, Prof Grimes manages to get blown up. “No one saw Professor Grimes’s eyeballs stretch out of his face before popping like grapes; his intestine pulling out and around his body like a jump rope, crisscross Applesauce; his mouth twisting in a soundless scream… No one saw his brains on the chalkboard; the toothy jaw fragment landing plop into his afternoon cup of that chilling Darjeeling.”

From such delightful beginnings, Alice Law, our protagonist, sets off to scour the depths of hell to revive Prof Grimes, as but for his intervention, she has zero job prospects. Prof Grimes is a smug, narcissistic bastard, and there’s no chance in hell he’s in the other place, yet Alice is practical and needs his nod to wrap up her thesis.

On the brink of diving into a pristine pentagram with chalk, Lembas bread, a perpetual flask and Proust for reading material, she is persuaded by the department demigod Peter Murdoch to permit him to tag along. Perhaps two heads and all, or because they are ex-lovers, or simply to further this story, she concedes.

And thus begins the chronicle of a journey to hell. “Hell, she had read, was an inconstant and shifting plane. Its landmarks were conceptual, not fixed.”

Hell disappoints in reality. It has night and day, as in the plane of the living. The passage of time is relayed in hours, and cell phones work. Why wouldn’t they? Also, the landscape is monotonous, predictable. It is, at least parts of it, Cambridge. Hell is quite like their “pizza anus” map.

An occupational hazard among women writers is that the men they dream up are so perfect they can only be fiction. So, there’s this overdone trope of a faltering, messed-up woman with the towering intellectual giant by her side to absorb the shocks of their underworld journey. “One step, then two, and then he broke into a run. Alice darted forth. They collided. Peter’s arms wrapped around her, and hers around him. He was so radiantly warm, so alive and solid. She burst into tears.” Peter Murdoch exudes such green flag energy that he himself turns colourless; a provider of clues to the gaps in Alice’s knowledge, a prop.

The biggest dilemma of the book though is extrinsic.

Who is this book pitched to? In tone and in content, the 13-17 age group. Like Percy Jackson introduces Greek myths to younger readers, this does the same for foundational studies in humanities via Plato, Kant, Bentham and Nietzsche; there’s even a cat named Archimedes. A mainstream book by a bestselling author, so its tenor, material and ambition are discomfiting, at an internecine war within. An immature tale of lovers a la Eurydice and Orpheus: onto this shaky foundation is piled arcane texts that circulate only in the hallowed circles of academia.

Besides, there’s this burning need, this desire to vilify the institutions of learning while using material from her role within it. Although, come to think of it, which grad student hasn’t visualised her guide in an everlasting bonfire?

Despite its flaws, it is a clever little book that elevates fantasy to a bubbling art form. “But magicians lived in the air, dancing on a tentative staircase of ideas, and it was a source of endless delirium, to know that the instant the world began to bore you, you could snap your fingers, and you’d be in freefall once again.”

Editing is a forgotten art, and we’re given verbose, unedited books with ramblings and inchoate thought-fragments, interspersed with gems of brilliance. Notes make it to the mainframe of the book.

These flaws notwithstanding, Katabasis is a bipolar work: it shows deep erudition, quoting from the best human knowledge can aspire to, while being wrapped in juvenile prose, and in the language of the Gen Zers, almost ‘cringe’.

Alice just has to find the Dialetheia, exchange it for Grimes’ soul with Lord Yama and return. In the end, she abandons all for the most important, for what matters: love.

At its heart, Katabasis is a youthful romp posing as Dante’s Inferno, written in an overwrought Lemony Snickett style. Perhaps hell is also wading through 545 pages of uneven, overwrought writing that could easily have been 300, of the most pertinent and elegant bits.

In short, Kuang’s writing is a mix of profound and puerile, a paradox.