Katabasis Review: Takes 2 to Make Hell Boring
Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
R. F. Kuang’s ‘Katabasis’ severely underestimates the number of people who’d be willing to go to hell if all it took was giving up half their lifespan, especially if the trip meant saving somebody who’d guarantee them a job. The novel’s plot is on point for the 2020s: two desperate Cambridge post-grad scholars studying ‘Magick’, journey to the underworld to retrieve their brilliant but dead thesis advisor, as they think he is their only ticket to a bright academic future. The premise is darkly comical. But the execution is very very questionable.
By the end of the first chapter of ‘Katabasis’, which is just 16 pages long, Alice the protagonist was already sounding a like Rin re-hashed, the heroine from R.F Kuang’s ‘Poppy War’ trilogy. Alice says something about how she’d sacrifice her first-born for a job, which is such an odd thing to say, since she is single, unmarried and nowhere near having a baby, and because Rin from Poppy War has her uterus removed so it wouldn’t distract her from her ‘warrior goals’.
In-fact, even Peter, the secondary protagonist, sounded like a mash of Kitay and Nezha, a solid nerd and a charmer. Peter is positioned as Alice’s rival, even though they have a love-hate relationship, much like Rin and Nezha. I hoped these differences would start to fade over the course of the novel, but Alice remains a slightly rehashed version of Rin through the course of the novel, without the crazy supernatural powers.
What R. F. Kuang does in ‘Katabasis’ is take all sorts of accounts of hell from around the world, from Italian philosopher Dante’s texts to Chinese mythology, and gives us a weirdly boring underworld, which appears as a Cambridge campus to Alice and Peter. ‘Hell is a campus’. Of course. At first, the concept sounded interesting, that hell appears to people as whatever they’re most comfortable with, so that their transition from life to death is easier. However, it’s ridiculously annoying that Alice and Peter would constantly run into academics like them.
I get that this is dark academia, but does that mean 80% of the novel has to read like the author is constantly quoting philosophers? Alice and Peter are supposed to be searching for Professor Grimes, their strict, brilliant, manipulative mentor. And after some bickering, they decide to trek through the eight courts of hell to find his soul and bargain with Yama, Hades, or whoever’s in charge down there, to bring Grimes back.
The first court they enter (Pride) turns out to be a library, which feels like a blatant attempt to woo readers with bookish imagery. When the protagonists run into trouble, they’re granted refuge on a boat on the legendary River Styx by a young shade, who just so happens to be a Cambridge alumnus. Later, one of the courts is a city where souls spend eternity writing theses to justify their vile acts.
In Katabasis, the dark academia theme is stretched thin, with an overreliance on everything scholarly. At this point, it’s almost surprising the final boss of Hell isn’t Professor Charles Xavier or J.R.R. Tolkien himself (he was a professor at Oxford). You know, just stretch the academia blanket all the way.
The First Court is a fancy library with statues, perhaps something like this (Representational Image)
‘Katabasis’ was more entertaining in flashbacks, when it would show readers what life was like at the Cambridge campus for Alice, especially in the first year. And that’s not a compliment, because why is hell more blander than campus life? The heart of Alice’s arc lies in her toxic bond with Professor Grimes, a mentor whose brilliance is paired with cruelty. He’s manipulative, controlling, and takes pleasure in cutting his students down, yet Alice excuses it all, as if intellectual genius gives him the license to be abusive. But is he even a genius? We learn the truth over the course of the novel.
Alice’s journey to hell is an elaborate metaphor for how academia is worse than literal hell, which author R.F. Kuang demonstrates well through the pages of ‘Katabasis’. Clearly Cambridge is so awful, a trip to hell seems worth it. But this novel should’ve been half its length and definitely needed to be a lot more imaginative.
The climactic events of ‘Katabasis’ give Alice a far too convenient solution to her problems, it’s almost romantic, maybe even ‘cute’. That’s really not what I had signed up for when I ordered my copy.
Rating for ‘Katabasis’: 2 on 5 stars.
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