5/18/2023 0 Comments Babel arcane history![]() ![]() ![]() He lives in the Professor’s house where he is tutored in several languages but gets little or no personal attention or affection from Lovell. Robin agrees to the Professor’s terms and sails to England. He uses Robin, taken from a children’s book earlier in his boyhood, and chooses Swift as a surname because of Gulliver’s Travels and the parallel between himself and the adventures of a man thrust into strange new worlds. The Professor insists the boy adopt an English name. Or he can go back to live in the poverty of his Cantonese home without family or much hope for any kind of future, just as early death. When he’s better, the Professor offers the boy the chance to be raised and educated in England and then to go on to Oxford. He is rescued by a gruff Englishman, Professor Lovell, who brings him back to health with the aid of a strange silver bar. The story begins in Canton, China, where a young boy is dying from cholera after seeing the rest of his family wiped out by the disease. I was skeptical at first how this could all come together, but it does so quite brilliantly. Babel is part bildungsroman, part disquisition on language, part adventure of anti- colonialism and empire building, part love of Oxford and privilege, part alternate history of early industrialization, part story of deep friendships, part analysis of racism and power, and more besides. ![]()
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