Katabasis by RF Kuang review – a descent into the hellscape of academia

The Guardian

a day ago

The more academia has broken your heart, the more you'll love RF Kuang's new novel. Katabasis knows the slow grind of postgrad precarity: the endless grant grubbing and essay marking; the thesis chapters drafted, redrafted and quietly ignored by a supervisor who can't be bothered to read – let alone reply to – an email. Living semester to semester, pay shrinking, workload metastasising, cannon fodder in a departmental forever war. Katabasis knows how it feels to spend your best thinking years doing grunt work to further someone else's ideas, clinging to the bottom rung of a ladder you will never be allowed to climb: less an ivory tower than a pyramid scheme.
Academia is a hellscape; Katabasis just makes it literal. The American author's sixth novel is an infernal twist on the campus farce: David Lodge with demons. Kuang's previous book, 2023's Yellowface, satirised the publishing industrial complex with an irresistible mix of gallows humour and gossip. A tale of toxic allies, commodified identity and hollow moralising, it was lapped up – with predictable irony – by the very people it skewered, like a real-life version of the stunt novel in Percival Everett's Erasure. The year before Yellowface, in the cult hit Babel, she invented an elaborate, counter-historical version of Oxford University – and then blew it up. A literary Rhodes Must Fall.
All of which is to say, Kuang isn't subtle. She doesn't allude; she indicts. Some structures are so intractable, she argues – so insidiously self-replicating – they can only be disrupted with blunt force. But she also knows that a joke can deliver the same hard clarity as rage; sometimes more. She doesn't pull her punches, or her punchlines.
In Katabasis, hell is not a roiling pit of fire, it's worse: 'Hell is a campus.' Cambridge postgrads Alice Law and Peter Murdoch are here on a quest. They're searching for their thesis supervisor, the recently deceased Professor Jacob Grimes. The victim of a grisly lab accident, Grimes has exploded, and not just in rage. His body is in bits, and his soul is in the queue for judgment. Without him, Alice and Peter's academic futures are equally damned. Their plan is simple: sneak into the underworld and haul him back. It worked so well for Orpheus.
This is the 1980s: post-structuralism is eating meaning and theory is eating itself. Our dauntless duo are scholars in 'analytic magick', an archaic and volatile branch of the humanities where philosophy is actually useful (that's Kuang's joke, not mine; don't sic the Nietzscheans on me). It's a similar discipline to the one Kuang invented in Babel, with the intellectual friction of a paradox harnessed and mechanised ('Magick taunts physics and makes her cry'). There's special chalk involved this time, some algebra and pentagrams. Once again, it's best not to think too hard about it. Just surrender to the conceit.
The real dark magic in this book is self-delusion. As Alice and Peter wander the 'eight courts of hell' (Dante was mostly right), they come to realise how deeply they've internalised the extractive logic of the academy. They've been taught to mistake rivalry for strength, exploitation for meritocracy, privilege for prestige, and endurance for resilience. To thank the system that feeds on them. The lie was so simple: you can be the exception, if you're willing to be exceptional. And it was Grimes – rapacious, scornful and addicted to his own myth – who made them believe it. The quest to save him begins to curdle, but old allegiances run deep ('Professor Grimes hadn't tormented just anyone. He'd tormented them … whatever they became when he was done with them would be so dazzling'). It's not easy to shake a validation fetish.
Scathing about the institution, faithful to the ideal: Kuang is a campus novelist to the core. Katabasis is a celebration of 'the acrobatics of thought'. A tale of poets and storytellers, thinkers and theorists, art-makers and cultural sorcerers. It jostles with in-jokes, from the Nash equilibrium to Escher's impossible staircase; Lacan to Lembas bread. This is a novel that believes in ideas – just not the cages we build for them.
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Babel ended in cleansing fire. There was something queasy in that final, flaming gesture – a flirtation with martyrdom that never quite questioned its own romance. Death as purity. Destruction as justice. Katabasis is messier, and more generous. It turns away from the allure of heroic sacrifice toward something far harder: survival. It doesn't ask what we're willing to die for, but what keeps us here – the oldest and most obstinate of our philosophical questions, and the most beautiful.
Katabasis is far from perfect. There's a pair of blood-drunk villains who feel like a gory distraction, and a nonsense MacGuffin. Bone creatures clatter through plot holes. Grand mythologies collide and compete. Chunks of the novel read like a Rowan Atkinson sketch. And the 1980s faculty politics look deceptively – or perhaps wearily – like our own (a fascinating companion read would be Helen Garner's 1995 landmark provocation The First Stone). But none of that really matters – especially if you have a score to settle.
The heretical glee of this novel is irrepressible. I escaped from my PhD 14 years ago, and it really did feel like an escape; it still does. This book reminded me why. It also reminded me how it felt to ascend from a hell of my own making and not look back. I read Katabasis in a single sitting and then slept the deep, unburdened sleep of someone who'd never even heard of Foucault.
Katabasis by RF Kuang is published by HarperVoyager (£22). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.