Photo by Craig Brown/Alamy Live News
RF Kuang keeps them coming: the 29 year-old has published her sixth novel. But things are different with Katabasis. For one thing, Kuang is now among the most popular authors in the world, after her last book, Yellowface, was one of the most popular releases of the last decade. For another, she has new, graver concerns.
Not long ago, Kuang’s husband was hospitalised for an undiagnosed chronic disease. His illness worsened and he lost a lot of weight. Katabasis is dedicated to him. In one interview, she said the writing was motivated by the question “What kind of suffering would you have had to have gone through for hell to seem like a better alternative?”
Kuang readers familiar only with Yellowface might expect a realist satire. That book ridiculed both extremes of the culture wars; in it, a writer feigns being Asian to benefit from positive discrimination, while another resents people dismissing her quality because she is Asian. But to write Katabasis, Kuang returned to her favoured genre: fantasy.
Alice Law is an American studying “magick” at Cambridge University. For the most part, that’s less glamorous than it sounds. An academic magician’s life involves squabbling over co-authorships and pondering a transfer to management consultancy. Alice and her scholarly rival Peter are plunged into drama by the accidental death of their supervisor. Jacob Grimes was a monster who frequently made undergraduates cry; but he was also the most famous and gifted magician in the world. For the price of half their lives, Alice and Peter can go to hell and attempt to save him.
So there are purgatoried souls, bargaining deities, evil conjurers, shapeshifting fortresses, and always the menace of the Lethe, the river whose waters make travellers forget all memory and knowledge. Dante, Orpheus and the other great laureates of the underworld are magicians who have made the journey before, but the book is never ponderous. Alice explains that Socrates would bang on about “celestial space worms”; Heraclitus was in most respects “a complete ass”.
You see why Kuang sells so much. Breaking the journey into seven zones – one for each deadly sin – gives Kuang lots of opportunity for invention and comedy. “Christ,” Peter remarks, “hell is a campus.” Pride is a library, home to people who had self-published self-help books and whose questions were really comments. At one stage, Alice and Peter are saved from the Weaver Girl deity by a sudden onslaught of bone-dogs, then saved from those dogs on the next page by the sudden appearance of a mysterious boatman. And all the while, a will-they-won’t-they of the classical form operates between Alice and Peter. After a fairly blunt initiation – Alice awakens from their camp as “something hard dug against her thigh” – this plays out with detail and tenderness.
Occasionally, there are clumsier moments. Wind whips, rain hammers, chasms yawn, and tired eyelids are “like weights.” Frustrated and near a block, Alice “kick[s] at the rock until her toes hurt.” Having been told the block is made of marble, the reader wonders for how long that “until” can take. But you don’t really mind. Kuang is having fun with the language – a man’s intestines spool out “like a jump rope, crisscross applesauce”.
Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month
Often, the violent tour of sin is paused for a leisurely tour of Kuang’s interests. We hear about academic life, the writing process, feminism, consent, ambition and many other topics, always pleasantly, easily told. Readers will breeze to the end of Katabasis and it will probably sell in vast quantities. However, Kuang has announced her own terms for the success of her new book, and they’re not commercial. The book hinges on its darkest parts. It was meant to deal with suicide and chronic illness.
Probably, the assessment on these is that she’s missed one and nailed the other. The passage revealing that Peter suffers Crohn’s disease does not really feel integrated. It is narrated in one long chunk that the reader feels could have been pasted at any point. The suicide theme, on the other hand, is woven throughout the story. The Lethe runs through Kuang’s hell, and is always quietly lapping. As in the myths, its water wipes away a person’s memories and feelings on contact. It is a danger to the creatures of hell. But to Alice it is always a temptation too. She has many arresting thoughts about how difficult it is to be alive and to know it, how much easier it might be to be free of consciousness. Profound moments on this theme arise, then subside. They never linger too long on the page. But they certainly linger in the mind.
[See also: The revenge of the young male novelist]
Content from our partners