Trigger warning for animal death.
Alice Law has sacrificed everything to become a Cambridge-educated magician: her social life, sleep, possibly her sanity. These sacrifices got her to Cambridge and a place with the world’s most innovative magician, Jacob Grimes. Unfortunately, these sacrifices may also have lead to Grimes’s sudden, violent death. The only chance now for Alice to finish her education is to somehow get Grimes out of hell. Katabasis, R.F. Kuang’s latest mind-bending novel, begins just as Alice put the finishing touches on the pentagram that’s going to help her sneak into hell.
Magic, in Alice’s world, is based on creating paradoxes that warp reality just enough for the impossible to happen. The Liar’s Paradox can create powerful traps. Zeno’s Paradoxes are a mini arsenal of chaos. Paired with carefully drawn pentagrams, special chalk, and multilingual chanting, magicians can temporarily create wonders. There are a few places where the plot bogs down as Alice and her partner-in-magic-and-hell, Peter Murdoch, think about or discuss the possibilities of philosophy, linguistics, and very complicated mathematics. Readers who can make in through these passages will be rewarded with a fascinating exploration of the afterlife and of whether sacrificing so much of what is necessary is too high a price to pay for magic.
The hell that Alice and Peter (who refused to let Alice descend into the underworld alone after he barged in on her finishing her pentagram) encounter is much more like what the Greeks, Chinese, and pre-Christians envisioned, though there are more than a few nods to Dante. Souls are trapped in different parts of hell to suffer punishment for their sins and character flaws. The lustful and greedy, for example, are stuck until they can learn to be satisfied with what they have instead of either endlessly indulging themselves or stealing from others. Dis is full of souls trying to shortcut the process by writing a dissertation that justifies their bad deeds. (The place is a marvel of obliviousness.) Alice and Peter work their way through the various regions of hell, avoiding other souls and the supernatural denizens of the underworld, on their quest to find Grimes’s soul. To make things even more dangerous, they learn that there are two absolutely monstrous dead magicians who have found ways to conquer hell.
The road is long, often baffling, and frequently puts our protagonists in mortal danger, but there are enough breaks to give Alice and Peter a chance to wonder if it’s all really worth it. We know from early in Katabasis that Grimes is a complete shit. In life, he didn’t care about anyone or anything but his projects. He ran through graduate students like Kleenex and wasn’t above stealing their work or pushing them into unethical experiments. He may have been the best, but is he the kind of magician that Alice wants to be? Is she really the kind of person who would walk over others to get to the lonely top of the heap? Can that life really bring happiness? Katabasis offers so much food for thought that my head still feels overstuffed, even though I finished it over a week ago.