Finding one's self on the road to hell

In a recent profile in The New Yorker, Hua Hsu describes author R.F. Kuang as someone who appears to be trying to reinvent herself with every book she writes, noting that she's written in "an unpredictable range of styles and genres during the past ten years," jumping from epic fantasy with The Poppy War to dark academia with Babel to literary intrigue with Yellowface. "I think I completely reinvent myself every few years,” Kuang told Hsu, and that "there is no attraction, for me, to being the most competent or well-read person in the room, because then there’s nowhere to go."

Her latest book is Karabasis, a sprawling, ambitious, philosophical, and thought-provoking read about what drives us through life while exploring academia's power struggles and personality cults. She introduces us to Alice Law, an anxious, driven graduate student studying at Cambridge University under Professor Jacob Grimes. In the opening pages, we find that something terrible has happened: when attempting a spell, something went wrong and Grimes was torn apart and sent to the eight circles of Hell. Alice recognizes that her future relies on the enormous stature that the professor had in the field: a recommendation letter from him would guarantee success in any career path she might choose, so she decides to follow him back down to Hell and bring him back.

After spending time in the archives and library studying what scholars like Dante, T.S. Elliot, or Orpheus have observed on their own trips, she pulls together some supplies and sets about getting ready to make the trip for herself, when she's joined by fellow Grimes student and her rival, Peter Murdoch, who's also decided to retrieve the late professor from the underworld.

What follows is a grim quest for the two students: they figure out how to travel to hell, and face the monumental task of finding Grimes. Once down there, there's any number of places he could be, from various circles like Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Wrath, and the others, in which they encounter scholars trapped in an endless academic existence, researching problems without solutions, or in their worldly desires and instincts that brought them there in the first place.

Along the way, they encounter others who've come to hell for their own purposes: Nick and Magnolia Kripke, twisted magicians who were on their own quest to discover a true contradiction, divine beings with their own malicious riddles and traps, and one of Grimes' former students who had committed suicide. Alice and Peter realize that getting into Hell wasn't the hard part: getting out is more difficult, and they have to work through their resentments and assumptions to figure out how to survive and trust one another to figure out how to accomplish their task and return to the world of the living.

Kuang has said that the idea for the book came to her as a "cute, silly adventure novel about like, ‘Haha, academia is hell,'" only to realize that the world of academia can be hellish: students endure tyrannical professors who'll stop at nothing to remain at the top of their fields, trapped in studies that have little relevance or interest to the real world, and who use the power their positions afford them to prey on those under them.

Alice is driven to succeed in her studies and is willing to do anything to achieve that goal, and anyone who's worked in academia or who's paid attention to the Me Too movement will recognize the challenges that she's had to endure. Grimes retaliates against her after his advances on her fail, he pits his students against one another to motivate their work (and for them to do his work), and he belittles them when they don't reach his sky-high standards. Alice's relationship with her professor feels almost like she's a hostage or suffering from Stockholm syndrome, in that she's entirely reliant on this one person, something he's all too willing to exploit.

At the same time, Kuang spins out a tale that feels a bit like Michael Shur's excellent TV series The Good Place, in which she, through Alice and Peter, takes readers through different philosophies and logical frameworks as they embark on their quest, wielding their magic through contradictions in logic and language to try and find their professor. It makes for a fascinating, brainy book, one that takes us through the field of logic and reasoning while exploring question of free will and our very existence. It's never dull; Kuang slowly unspools Alice and Peter's stories, teasing out their respective lives, motivations, and relationship to ultimately force them to reckon with how they've ended up in their predicament.

At the core of the book is a simple question: what drives and motivates us through life? Alice and Peter each have to eventually confront this query: why are we putting ourselves through this ordeal? Alice can become the best student she can and rise to the top of her field, but is this something that she really wants to do, or is she just following a path because it's set down before her? There's times when it feels a little overwrought, as though she's never sat down and contemplated her life and goals beyond accomplishing the next step in the path of academia, but life does have a way running away from you on autopilot if you aren't careful.

Kuang brings these various components together neatly, forcing her characters to reckon with their assumptions, motivations, and their very existence. In a lot of ways, this book feels like it's a deeply personal story, one that's reflective on the path that she's taken so far. Her characters might have set out on a quest to ostensibly save their professor – as it turns out, there's quite a bit more to Alice's intentions here – but as they make their way through the underworld, they experience what others who've made the journey have ultimately discovered: it's a journey that forces one to confront who they are at their core. They experience trials that tests them while the journey lays bare their truths and flaws, ultimately pushing them to reinterpret, reinvent, or reexamine their priorities and motivations as they try and figure out how to get back on the right path before it's too late and their end catches up to them.