While R.F. Kuang’s book Yellowface was taking the world by storm in 2023, the author was simultaneously working on her doctoral degree at Yale, and writing her genre-defying new novel, Katabasis. Described as Dante’s Inferno meets Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, Katabasis is the story of Alice Law, a Cambridge University student who must undertake a journey into the Underworld to recover the soul of her advisor, Jacob Grimes. To do so, she must sacrifice half of her remaining lifespan, but it seems a small price to pay to graduate, and besides, his untimely death may or may not have been her fault. (It was.) Coming along for the ride is the university’s golden boy and Alice’s academic rival, Peter Murdoch, who is as blithely unaware of his privilege as a white and well-connected man as he is of the barriers Alice has had to face as a non-white, non-well-connected woman in the same rarefied academic environs.
A natural successor to Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Katabasis is so grounded in practical theory and backed up with real-world bibliographical references that it seems almost plausible that readers can follow the protagonists on their journey into hell, should they want to. Drawing delightfully on existing texts like Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Aeneid, Dante’s Inferno, and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Katabasis blurs the line between reality and fantasy, then dishes it up with a satisfying serve of Kuang’s signature wit and sly humour. Woven into the adventure is a razor-sharp critique of the world of academia, with all the intellectual snobbery, power imbalances and abuses that take place within its walls.
This book ticks many of my boxes: witty banter, a formidably competent female protagonist, enough real-world references to send me on pleasurable literary side-quests to Wikipedia, and an excellent cat. It’s funny, it’s deliciously clever, and it’s wildly readable. I’m recommending it to everyone.
