Cambridge, Michaelmas Term, October. The wind bit, the sun hid, and on the first day of class, when she ought to have been lecturing undergraduates about the dangers of using the Cartesian severance spell to revise without pee breaks, Alice Law set out to rescue her advisor’s soul from the Eight Courts of Hell.
I went into this book completely cold, and I thought from the intro that Alice’s trip to Hell would be just the first in a long line of adventures as she deals with all the torments of getting a post graduate degree from the Royal Academy of Magick in Cambridge. Nope. The book does dance around the history of the characters, and the history of magick studies in Cambridge. The reader is dropped in and out of linear time, gradually finding out how Alice Law – along with Peter Murdoch, the rival student who she reluctantly brings along – could have gotten into a situation where scraping together the last remains of the brilliant Professor Jacob Grimes and bringing back his soul from the underworld might actually be a good idea.
But the bulk of the story takes place in Hell.
Now, I love a good framing device. Give me a pre-existing literary sandbox and let me watch what talented authors can make of it. And Hell has got to be one of the most fertile and fascinating sandboxes ever made. There are so many versions, from Dante to T.S. Elliot to whichever Greek poets wrote about the adventures of Orpheus and Odysseus in Hades. The possibilities are endless. What will it look like? How can you travel through it? What kinds of people will you find there, and what kinds of ironic punishments are they going through? To prepare for her rescue mission, Alice has studied every scrap of information she can get her hands on about every person who may or may not have journeyed to Hell and back, and even that might not be enough. Hell shapes itself to fit the souls of the people who pass through it, and the version of Hell that Alice and Peter find themselves in? Is academia.
“Christ,” said Peter. “Hell is a campus.”
R.F. Kuang has taken a fantastical concept – magick is real – and brought it down to the mundane world where people can study it, argue over it, maybe *gasp* get bored with it, and, oh yeah, travel to Hell with a secret pentagram in a locked lab room. And then she created all of the intricate, fascinating details about what all of that actually looks like. Spells are based on classic philosophical concepts: Ship of Theseus, Aristotelian Logic, the Ever Better Wine Paradox. The usual rivalry between competing academics can get really interesting in a world where normal physics doesn’t have to apply and flubbing a math equation is a death sentence. There are arguments about whether Hell is or is not a three-dimensional hyperbolic space once you apply it to Euclidean geometry. The intricacies of chalk alone can take an entire chapter: what it’s made of at the cellular level, where it’s mined from, which brand is better (arguments about that are inevitable), and how magician’s chalk can write on any surface. Mostly.
And underneath all the spells and peer-reviewed research and meticulously crafted chalk circles, magick is basically finding a lie and believing it so much that reality throws up its hands and says “Fine, be that way.” Which is good, because if there’s one thing that Alice Law is good at, it’s making herself believe whatever lie she needs to.
I am Alice Law. I am a postgraduate at Cambridge. I study analytic magick. I am in Hell. And everything is going just fine, just fine, just fine…
Navigating Hell would be enough of a challenge on its own, but Alice is uniquely damaged by her time in Cambridge. Succeeding isn’t just important, it’s the only thing. She’s struggled for years, sacrificed relationships, and neglected her health (both physical and mental). She has to convince herself to just not die every morning, and she’s put herself in the service of a towering narcissistic genius who’s recommendation would open every door for her. She’s fought against every roadblock that’s been thrown in her way due to the fact that she’s, y’know, female, and she’s watched every other woman who’s fought the same fight and won be dismissed as “well, she probably slept with the right person.” But it won’t happen to her, oh no, because she’s going to be one of the good ones. She’s going to be just desirable enough but not too forward, intelligent and strong-willed but not demanding, and she’s going to do whatever Professor Grimes needs, no matter how awful, because if she says yes then that means she’s still in control…
I’m sure it takes someone who’s gone through the process of getting a post graduate degree from Cambridge and has flawless storytelling skills to convey, not just how much that sounds like torture, but how much someone could want it. All of it. Alice and Peter, fellow soldiers in the trenches, skipping sleep and food, destroying their well-being and their health and working themselves to the bone on research projects that Professor Grimes would take all the credit for anyway and they loved it. Everything is funny when you were exhausted after midnight, you never bond with someone the way you do when you’re both suffering and succeeding together, and oh dear, how vulnerable that made them to each other. And how many opportunities it gave to hurt each other.
It feels completely natural, how the Hell they travel to mirrors things in the real word. It’s not just because it’s full of horrible people, but because it’s so good at giving people exactly whatever it is they spend their life chasing.
“Hell’s not so bad for the people who are in it. They’re exactly where they wanted to be.”
There are many, many opportunities for betrayal in Hell, and Peter and Alice both have a lot of time to regret their choices as the underworld unspools in front of them, and we find out how the rules change depending on whether you died and went to Hell, or did things the other way round. This is a Hell of Cerberus tearing through a crowd of cheering shades, a scam-artist centaur making promises in all-caps, a reality-jumping cat, and a river that will dissolve your memories and sweep them into a current of images and emotions. Old scandals from the real world become dangerous new enemies. We find out degrees of sin, who ends up in Desire, how the level of Violence is different from Cruelty, and why people in Pride are textbook definitions of “Better to rule in Hell…” And anyone who’s had to write a thesis (or had a nightmare about the same) will understand why that level could be pure torture. It also takes philosophical debate to the extreme, where jockeying for status and acclaim and trying to rationalize everything you’ve done wrong in your life as someone else’s fault becomes the absolute dumbest way to spend eternity.
In a way it reminds me of C.S. Lewis, and his theory (paraphrased) that every demon is an angel who fell. Evil desires are just good desires with everything good removed. And the higher a concept is when it’s good – love, loyalty, academic success – the worse it becomes when it falls. Everything Alice loved and admired about Cambridge and the eminent Professor Jacob Grimes is exactly the same as it always was, just with everything that she loved about it gone. Which leaves her to figure out what’s left. R.F. Kuang mercilessly skewers the bloated mess that academia is capable of, and then asks not “What is the meaning of life?” but “what reason do we have to keep going when the universe keeps giving us endless amount of proof that there isn’t any meaning at all?”