The tagline on my cover of Katabasis declares, “To hell with love”. It’s a pithy little summation of the book, one presumes. As a figurative statement you might facetiously paraphrase it, ‘I ain’t doing that love stuff no more”, if you find yourself somewhat weary of breakup novels full of jilted lovers. But in the case of R.F. Kuang’s latest novel, the literal meaning resides in the transitive verb: a journey to hell. In fact, the title, ‘katabasis’, (a word which never appears in the novel, itself) is taken from Greek (κατάβασις), meaning a descent. It was a term used to describe the descent of Orpheus into the Underworld to retrieve his lover, Eurydice. There have been other famous descents into hell. Aeneas descends to the Underworld in The Aeneid, to seek information about the prospects of Rome’s future. Dante also tours the nine levels of hell with Virgil – the same Virgil who wrote The Aeneid – as a spiritual journey of redemption. The term is not to be confused with ‘nekyia’ (also spelled ‘nekya’) which has associations with necromancy, a ritual to summon the dead, which is what we see in Book 11 of Homer’s Odyssey, when Odysseus descends to the edge of the Underworld to summon the blind seer, Tiresias, for advice. In Katabasis, a full descent is the subject of the plot (although necromancy is clearly a part of the plot, too). Alice Law resolves to take the journey to hell to bring back her thesis advisor, Professor Jacob Grimes, who has unfortunately exploded in a magical experiment gone wrong. Without Grimes, she tells us, she has no committee chair, which means she cannot defend her dissertation, which means she cannot graduate, or apply for jobs which will put her on-track for an academic position with tenure in analytic magick. It appears her life’s work is contingent upon a set of precariously-placed dominoes which Grimes’ death has set in motion; this, along with her own determination that she will settle for nothing less than the status that comes with a Cambridge University degree and the imprimatur of Grimes’ recommendation, to secure her place in the academic world.

So, since Grimes’ death, Alice has been studying tartarology, a field outside her expertise, to determine how to get herself into hell and back. The journey will cost her half her remaining lifespan. But she is willing to pay this price. Then she discovers that Peter Murdoch, an academic rival, has been studying the same texts and he intends to accompany her on her journey. It turns out that that preposition from the tagline, ‘with’, suggests the potential love interest of the novel, rather than its rejection.

Readers of Kuang’s two previous novels will feel somewhat familiar with the circumstances and tenets of Katabasis. These are stories of academia or writing – campus novels – along with their attendant concerns. Kuang’s life experience resides in academia and she is well placed to articulate its attractions and its torturous uncertainties. In fact, Kuang’s evocation of academia as hell is not subtle in that she literally turns hell into a university, with various levels that satirise different aspects of university life. The first level, associated with the sin of Pride, is a library where shades must try to ‘DEFINE THE GOOD’ before they can move on. The second level, associated with the sin of desire, incorporates a student centre which is suffused with a sense of decay, where shades obsessively fixate on inexplicable desires. In its physical layout, as it turns out, hell is similar to Dante’s vision: a series of levels devoted to addressing mortal sins of increasing severity on each succeeding level. Kuang provides three maps of hell, drawn by three of her main characters, showing the eight levels of hell (Dante had nine) through which they must search for Professor Grimes. By the time Kuang’s story brings us to the final level the academic conceit is well founded. The city of Dis is found on the final level, where the souls of the dead must submit a dissertation on their mortal life’s sins before they are able to cross into the river Lethe, forget their old life, and then be reincarnated. The whole thing feels more Kafkaesque than Buddhist. Like Joseph K., who never really knows what is going on with his arrest and upcoming trial, shades in the city of Dis remain in limbo, never able to progress, since their dissertations must first be accepted by the powers-that-be, whoever they are. These shades might work on their dissertations for many lifetimes, but once submitted for evaluation, they can never be retrieved. Their submissions mostly never receive a response (though one could never say how long that might take, anyway), and they never seem to result in success, though it is not known why, either. There is no feedback. The only options are to start again or give up. Kuang’s conception of academia is truly hellish!

Katabasis is an idea with potential, but it doesn’t quite reach the same notes, doesn’t carry its tune quite so well, as its predecessors. Yellowface was not a perfect novel, but it successfully addressed issues around social media, academic integrity and racial respect which are raised by June Hayward’s plagiarism. In contrast, Alice’s situation is somewhat more abstract for readers to initially invest in. Plagiarism may seem like an academic concern, but everyone understands theft and misrepresentation as they are dramatized in Yellowface. By describing the domino effect caused by Grimes’ death, Alice is attempting to articulate her problem – make her choice accessible to the reader – but it does not resonate as clearly. Alice’s plan seems extreme, even if we learn more of her motivations later, since the whole thing becomes a bit muddied in the minutiae of Kiang’s version of the Underworld and the inevitable beating-of-the-baddies plot that emerges as the precursor to a generic denouement. In Babel, shit goes down. There is a rebellion. People die. Principles are upheld. In Katabasis, it is easier to forget the novel’s most salient points since the plot leans into that classic story trope of boy and girl discovering one another, and it feels so much smaller in the scope of its imagination.

Is this a problem? Well, boy meets girl and beating baddies is fine. And yet . . .

The novel’s strongest aspects are those most like Babel. In Babel, the vehicle for magic is silver and language inscribed on silver pieces, translated to take advantage of the subtle differences in meaning from the lived culture of one people, to another. Magic is thus powered through these lexical interstices. The silver is a neat nod to the commercial exploitation of less powerful nations during the nineteenth century, while the act of translation helps to underpin the issue of colonialism, since magic is both a power and it draws upon the cultural richness of other nations. Mining other languages for the subtle differences in meaning afforded by translation leads to a culture of domination and exploitation. The parallels in Katabasis are obvious. Magick is performed by magicians who are once again academics at a famous tertiary institution. Instead of translation, however, academics use a series of logical puzzles and conundrums that exploit uncertainty and belief to effect magick. Instead of silver, various qualities and brands of chalk are used because “remnants of living-dead magical energy lay in the pulverized shells of those sea creatures that perished millions of years ago . . .” Through the use of chalk, used to inscribe circles and the formulae that will drive the magick, along with the conundrums and paradoxes that underpin it, magick is able to defy logic and the natural order of things: “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.”

Of course, it would seem for readers, the thing is just to accept that this all works and move on. But the relationship between magic and belief is a crucial factor in Kuang’s novel, not mere mechanics. In Babel magic is a metaphor for power and colonialism. In Katabasis the effective paradoxes of language encapsulate the dilemma of women in academia, which proves to still be a predominantly patriarchal enterprise in the 1980s in which the novel is set. It is only 1893, Kuang’s narrator tells us, when full degrees were first proposed for female students, and nearly another full century before all colleges at Cambridge admitted female students. Alice is astutely aware of her position as a female student, and her desire to succeed is balanced by her disinclination to upset the status quo. Feminism is already something embarrassing, almost taboo. Alice fears that strident feminists, “gave women a bad name” and “justified everything men believed about women”. Alice is a living paradox: a woman who has the opportunity to succeed due to the militancy of other women, but at the same time recoils from it. She is secretly offended by questions in faculty about when she will do as proper women do and get married and have babies, or by the leering attention she might receive from other academics who see her as a body first and foremost. And Alice understands the invidious position of female academics who only receive a position on account of their tenured husbands – what if they split up? She is in much the same position as a result of Grimes’ death. Like a wife who loses her tenured husband, Alice stands to lose everything with the loss of Grimes. Hers is a position without power that. To navigate academia Alice feels it best to keep a low profile (while her rival, Peter Mursoch may shine as much as he wishes). Being a woman, Alice feels, necessitates certain compromises and balances in her own behaviour and deportment to maintain a state of equilibrium between being liked and being taken seriously which she terms as the ‘mean’. By practising the ‘mean’ Alice understands that she will,

Wear clothes that were both perfectly attractive and perfectly modest, she could enjoy both the attention that being a woman in the department got her while also commanding respect as a scholar.

This is not to say that a woman should not hope to be both feminine and respected if she wants. In fact, from early in her academic career Alice’s aspirational role model is Magnolia Kripkes, who manages to stay true to her personal and professional principles:

Oh, Magnolia Kripke, of the raven-black hair and creamy, ageless skin. Her voice was sonorous, melodic. She carried herself, and all the womanly parts of her – breasts, hips, curves – with a poised confidence. She did not shy from flaunting her beauty. She did not hide it under baggy clothes and bad posture, the way so many women did. She made herself the center of attention.

Magnolia has a marriage of equality and a career predicated upon her own talents, not upon the tenured legitimacy of her spouse. She is respected and listened to in the academic world. Magnolia would seem to be the ideal, but in Alice’s real world, the quotidian lot of women is as paradoxical as the logical paradoxes upon which magick exists. She must walk a line between one thing and another, between exploiting her advantages but not being taken advantage of: being both alluring and appealing while at the same time distant and professional. To encourage an advance will diminish her standing, whereas to reject an advance could ruin her chances of a career. To pursue success as a woman in this world is akin to an act of magick, itself:

Believe in the lie – trust the lie – it is the only thing you have. Stay in the cage and paint the walls. If you do not, then you must quit; but if you can delude yourself long enough, then your delusions might very well come true.

This sentiment expresses the bind women potentially find themselves in: not only damned if you do and damned if you don’t, but you have to fake it until they make it, too. Just like magick. On magick, Alice reflects,

It wasn’t about the algorithms at all, it was about self-deception. You had to assemble enough proof to convince yourself the world could be another way, and as long as you could trick yourself, then you could trick the world.

On this level, Katabasis employs another clever magical metaphor to highlight its protagonist’s dilemma and the lot of women in academia (and the workplace) in general.

But Katabasis seems to lose its way precisely because its destination, by dint of the tradition of this kind of writing, feels inevitable. Adopting the key elements of Dante’s model gives structure to the plot, but so does the love trope which warps the story to an inevitable conclusion. It is easy to dismiss criticisms around this on the basis of the novel’s feminist themes: why shouldn’t women fall in love and be attractive and be successful? But the resolution is light weight in comparison to Babel, which is a more accomplished and satisfying novel.