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Books: The darkness behind the light
For author Rebecca F Kuang, writing books is about making arguments that help her explore life in all its lows and highs
Rebecca F Kuang was 19 years old when she started writing The Poppy War, the grim, dark fantasy novel which was published three years later by Harper Collins, and went on to be a finalist for the Locus, the Nebula, the World Fantasy, and other prestigious awards. The Dragon Republic and The Burning God, books two and three of the trilogy inspired by the Second Sino-Japanese War, were released to wide acclaim in the following years.
The author, whose family immigrated to the United States from Guangzhou, China, when she was just four years old, is a scholar first and foremost. After completing her BA in History from Georgetown, Rebecca was a 2018 Marshall Scholar at Magdalene College, University of Cambridge (MPhil in Chinese Studies); studied at the University of Oxford in 2019 (MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies); and is currently at Yale University (PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures).
Her new novel, Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution (which released this August) is a dark academia tome set in 1830s England. The publisher’s blurb dubs it ‘a thematic response to The Secret History by Donna Tartt and a tonal response to Susanna Clark’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell’, while Rebecca herself describes it as a ‘love letter and break-up letter to Oxford’. Over a Zoom call earlier this summer, I asked her to elaborate.
“The tension of the love letter and the break-up letter was my way of expressing the contradiction of wanting so badly to belong to a place, but knowing everything that place stands for,” Rebecca clarified.
“The Secret History has always been one of my favourite books. I think there is something about the fantasy of being at an elite institution and getting to reinvent yourself, enjoying ‘being in the club’ and enjoying the prestigious society of scholars untouched by space and time. It was the fantasy I had when I first started at Oxford, and it is still the fantasy that I cling to whenever I think about my time there.
“But I also had a terrible time there; I think it was the common problem that a lot of scholars in my fellowship programme were struggling with: drinking the ‘Champagne’ and enjoying everything that came with our fellowship, but also learning about the colonial history of places like that and the role that elite institutions—not just Oxford but Cambridge, Harvard, Yale etc—play in replicating and promoting elite classes who have gone on to make terrible decisions about the fates of nations.”
Pushing the limits
As an academic, themes draw her in before anything else in her narrative process. A former debate scholar, she always thinks in terms of arguments and never wants to write something unless she is making a point with it. But this impulse intersects with a strong sense of place before she forms any tangible story ideas, which, she shared, is a recent realisation.
“In being able to travel more this summer than I have at any point in the last few years, I’ve realised how important a sense of place is to my writing—I’ve been to England, Scotland, Poland, and I’m about to go to Italy for a month. There is a richness in seeing new architecture, eating new food, the air smelling different, experiencing different histories and cultures and people,” Rebecca said.
“I started writing The Poppy War when I was in Beijing, speaking Chinese for the first time, walking around ancient temples and learning all this history. Similarly the first sparks of Babel were inspired during my year in Oxford. So, it’s place first and the place is what gives a foundation for the arguments I want to make,” she added.
There is no denying the complexity of this young author’s work, whether the themes, the nuance of their execution, or the characters (never tidily sorted into boxes). And then, there are the magic systems, the foundations upon which her stories unfold. Why fantasy, I wondered.
“I don’t have a very smart answer to this. I used to try to make stuff up, like speculative [fiction] and fabulism let us use magical elements as refracting prisms for issues we want to isolate and expand—and that’s all kind of true. But I just think fantasy is fun, and if you could push the limits of physics, be creative and imagine things that aren’t, and write about those, instead of writing about the world that already exists, why wouldn’t you? It isn’t ‘escapist nonsense’ and I don’t understand the bias against fantasy or other genre fiction in certain literary circles,” she said.
She paused and added, “I just think it’s fun and cool and that’s why I do it!”
Academic horrors
Rebecca’s next book, Yellowface, will be out in 2023, and she is already at work on number six.
“It’s an academia horror story—everyone in academia has to constantly ask themselves why it was rational to pursue a life of torture and no job prospects and constant stress. I’m interested in paradoxes of rational choice; how can we make decisions that seem to us in the moment to be completely rational and appropriate and find ourselves in sub-optimal or, indeed, bad outcomes?” Rebecca asked.
She added, “It’s not related to this side of things but [I have also been thinking about] what is a just life? What is flourishing, and how /do we think about these questions in terms of the life of a scholar? This is my first time writing a novel in a field I am not even adjacent to [this is her fiancé’s field] so it’s exciting.”
From HT Brunch, October 29, 2022
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