Book Review: Katabasis by RF Huang
About the book
Katabasis, noun, Ancient Greek. The story of a hero's descent to the underworld.
Grad student Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become the brightest mind in the field of analytic magick. But the only person who can make her dream come true is dead and – inconveniently – in Hell. And Alice, along with her biggest rival Peter Murdoch, is going after him.
But Hell is not as the philosophers claim, its rules are upside-down, and if she’s going to get out of there alive, she and Peter will have to work together. That’s if they can agree on anything.
Will they triumph, or kill each other trying?
Why we loved it
If there's one thing you can rely on with an R. F. Kuang novel, it's that they are never generic or formulaic. Always surprising and always thought-provoking, this is an author who consistently writes books that require the reader's complete attention.
Katabasis has been on my radar for a while now because the idea of two postgrad Cambridge students of Magick (yes, this is a magic with a K kind of book) journeying through the eight circles of Hell just to get a letter of recommendation from their dead professor is guaranteed to grab my attention.
Alice Law and Peter Murdoch are our two main protagonists and the book follows them as they join forces to travel through hell and retrieve their recently deceased doctoral supervisor. There's plenty of action throughout the book, from skeletal monsters chasing them through the deserts of the underworld to the shades of long-dead magicians hell-bent on cheating death by any means possible.
But alongside the adventure, the novel combines a mix of philosophical ideas about Hell, from Dante’s Inferno and legends of Greek mythology to King Yama in Asian folklore, imagining an afterlife that is fluid and personal, capable of taking on a form that best reflects the beliefs of the individual passing through it. For Alice and Peter, this means that Hell manifests as a shadow version of the place most familiar to them - Cambridge itself.
There's something about the mixture of the college setting, intellectual rivalry and the pursuit of knowledge that reminded me of books as varied as Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series and Susannah Clarke's Piranesi as well as Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Not because they're particularly similar in plot, but because they all have that sense of stepping into a world that's governed by logic, but where history, magic and science are interconnected.
R.F Kuang tends to write with an assumption that readers will be happy to engage with a variety of philosophical ideas but cleverly avoids falling into the trap of over-explaining every single reference. For me, there were references I understood and some I didn't, but it never detracted from being able to follow the story.
There's also an intriguing will they/won't they romance at the centre of the book too. Alice and Peter are a couple you can't help but love - they're equally flawed, make mistakes and are far too caught up in their own insecurities to see what's right in front of them.
With romance, adventure, academia, magic with a K, and just enough big philosophical ideas to send you down a post-book research rabbit hole afterwards, what’s not to love about Katabasis? It might not be the easiest book you'll read this year, but it'll definitely be one of the best!
