{"id":67036,"date":"2025-08-14T07:05:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-14T07:05:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/67036\/"},"modified":"2025-08-14T07:05:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-14T07:05:07","slug":"katabasis-by-rf-kuang-review-a-descent-into-the-hellscape-of-academia-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/67036\/","title":{"rendered":"Katabasis by RF Kuang review \u2013 a descent into the hellscape of academia | Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

The more academia has broken your heart, the more you\u2019ll love RF Kuang<\/a>\u2019s 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\u2019t be bothered to read \u2013 let alone reply to \u2013 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\u2019s ideas, clinging to the bottom rung of a ladder you will never\u00a0be\u00a0allowed to climb: less an ivory tower than a pyramid scheme.<\/p>\n

Academia is a hellscape; Katabasis just makes it literal. The American author\u2019s sixth novel is an infernal twist on the campus farce: David Lodge with demons. Kuang\u2019s previous book, 2023\u2019s Yellowface<\/a>, 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 \u2013 with predictable irony \u2013 by the very people it skewered, like a real-life version of the stunt novel in Percival Everett\u2019s Erasure. The year before Yellowface, in the cult hit Babel<\/a>, she invented an elaborate, counter-historical version of Oxford University \u2013 and then blew it up. A literary Rhodes Must Fall<\/a>.<\/p>\n

All of which is to say, Kuang isn\u2019t subtle. She doesn\u2019t allude; she indicts. Some structures are so intractable, she argues \u2013 so insidiously self-replicating \u2013 they can\u00a0only be disrupted with blunt force. But she also knows that a joke can deliver the same hard clarity as rage; sometimes more. She doesn\u2019t pull her punches, or her punchlines.<\/p>\n

In Katabasis, hell is not a roiling pit of fire, it\u2019s worse: \u201cHell is a campus.\u201d Cambridge postgrads Alice Law and Peter Murdoch are here on a quest. They\u2019re 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\u00a0body is in bits, and his soul is in the queue for judgment. Without him, Alice and Peter\u2019s academic futures are equally damned. Their plan is simple: sneak into the underworld and haul him back. It worked so well for Orpheus.<\/p>\n

This is a novel that believes in ideas \u2013 just not the cages we build for them<\/p>\n

This is the 1980s: post-structuralism is eating meaning and theory is eating itself. Our dauntless duo are scholars in \u201canalytic magick\u201d, an archaic and volatile branch of the humanities where philosophy is actually useful (that\u2019s Kuang\u2019s joke, not mine; don\u2019t sic the Nietzscheans on me). It\u2019s a similar discipline to the one Kuang invented in Babel, with the intellectual friction of a paradox harnessed and mechanised (\u201cMagick taunts physics and makes her cry\u201d). There\u2019s special chalk involved this time, some algebra and pentagrams. Once again, it\u2019s best not to think too hard about it. Just surrender to the conceit.<\/p>\n

The real dark magic in this book is self-delusion. As Alice and Peter wander the \u201ceight courts of hell\u201d (Dante was mostly right), they come to realise how deeply they\u2019ve internalised the extractive logic of the academy. They\u2019ve 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\u2019re willing to be exceptional. And it was Grimes \u2013 rapacious, scornful and addicted to his own myth \u2013 who made them believe it. The quest to save him begins to curdle, but old allegiances run deep (\u201cProfessor Grimes hadn\u2019t tormented just anyone. He\u2019d tormented them \u2026 whatever they became when he was done with them would be so dazzling\u201d). It\u2019s not easy to shake a validation fetish.<\/p>\n

Scathing about the institution, faithful to the ideal: Kuang is a campus novelist to the core. Katabasis is a celebration of \u201cthe acrobatics of thought\u201d. 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\u2019s impossible staircase; Lacan to Lembas bread. This is a novel that believes in ideas \u2013 just not the cages we build for them.<\/p>\n

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Babel ended in cleansing fire. There was something queasy in that final, flaming gesture \u2013 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\u2019t ask what we\u2019re willing to die for, but what keeps us here \u2013 the oldest and most obstinate of our philosophical questions, and the most\u00a0beautiful.<\/p>\n

Katabasis is far from perfect. There\u2019s 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<\/a>. And the 1980s faculty politics look deceptively \u2013 or perhaps wearily \u2013 like our own (a fascinating companion read would be Helen Garner\u2019s 1995 landmark provocation The First Stone<\/a>). But none of that really matters \u2013 especially if you have a score to settle.<\/p>\n

The heretical glee of this novel is irrepressible. I\u00a0escaped 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\u2019d never even heard\u00a0of Foucault.<\/p>\n

Katabasis by RF Kuang is published by HarperVoyager (\u00a322). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com<\/a>. Delivery charges may apply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The more academia has broken your heart, the more you\u2019ll love RF Kuang\u2019s new novel. Katabasis knows the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":67037,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[64,63,457,134],"class_list":{"0":"post-67036","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-books","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67036\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}