Two post-docs at the end of their school days journey into Hell to try and bring back the soul of their mentor, Professor Jacob Grimes. Along the way, they discuss paradoxes, depictions of Hell, the many sufferings of grad school, their personal failings, and the many different ways great people can have failed legacies. It works best when it is smart and funny (and alas Kuang abandons this combination for a fair chunk of the novel’s center) and seems a quite important book, just one as flawed as the book’s characters.
SUMMARY
Alice Law and Peter Murdoch are going to Hell. Willingly. Professor Jacob Grimes is dead. He was brilliant. Lauded. Received awards including the Nobel Prize. He was also their mentor and advisor. They are very near their post-doc career and Grimes’s stamp of approval will be their gateway to the life they want: scholars of magick backed by the biggest name in the business. Giving up The Price — half their remaining years — seems to pale in comparison in making that life the life they desperately want.
Only Professor Grimes is far from perfect. Alice and Peter themselves are flawed. Caught up in secrets and secret struggles. As they travel through the Eight Courts of Hell on the shores of the Lethe, as they learn more about each other and themselves, we begin to suspect that Hell is perhaps where at least some of them might belong.
CONTENT WARNINGS: First, this is a novel about Hell. A passingly twee one in most places, but it still deals with an amalgamation afterlife, punishment, and troubled souls. It is perhaps not the Hell of extreme horror, but it at least opens the doorway. [For specifics, click to show the spoilers:] hDqfqGS yYG hDqfqGS 3GSy8q6Y (j68l), hSJDyj xllyDj8 (GSUqf8q6Yl yWS jyWQSjA aqjG wD8 q8 ql y 5yqWjA l8W6YQ 8tSaS), hSJqla (j68l), xYqayj hD55SWqYQ, ktqjG RDWGSW, hUqWq8Dyj 4Sl8WDf8q6Y, z6WS, ha6uqYQ, ktW6Yqf 3jjYSll (kW6tY’l), 4WqYuqYQ, hSJ (yja6l8 a6WS qY UyllqYQ 8t6DQt q8 8SYGl 86 wS y 8yTGWA TtSY q8 lt6Tl DU), bSl8qyjq8A (y UyllqYQ WS5SWSYfS 86 6Wyj lSJ Tq8t yY yYqayj), yYG l6aS 68tSW a6WS 8yTGWA ylUSf8l 65 GyWuSW ayQqfu.
REVIEW: Katabasis
The first 100 or so pages had me considering this book to be not only perfect for me — with its blend of humor, erudition, horror, speculation, and humanity — but also perhaps one of those rarer books that shows up that becomes a cornerstone of the genre. It was not just the obvious games of paradox and amalgamated depictions of Hell, it was the games being played that required almost no in-novel confirmation to work.
The outer plains of Hell giving way to a great ivory wall that seems to surround everything but can be climbed? Long lines of people drifting up while others are unsure? Our first proper taste of a central allegory of the novel: Hell is college is Alice Law (and Peter). A trinity of beings all described in strikingly similar ways. In other words, this book is guarded by a three-headed beast: it is its own Cerberus.
Though as a person who graduated from Grad School many years ago, depicting The Price [of high learning] being giving up half of your years is very much so a young-person’s allegory. It is a folly of youth to think of it in such terms.
But such playfulness opens up other things. We are told, essentially, that almost all the very many depictions of Hell are all correct but also wrong — a paradox where the book plays with its own Law of the Excluded Middle (that something is either true or it is not, a concept purposefully tossed out the window many times despite its importance to the plot) — and in doing so we start to realize there is an unspoken trip to Hell being brought along: Alice in Wonderland. Makes sense. Magic in this world requires paradox and Lewis Carroll’s works loved paradox. Now, is Peter the rabbit or is he the Pan? That’s a harder read but if Wonderland is a sojourn through Hell then why not Neverland?
Only after the first century of pages, the feeling fades. Pride [I will not be marking somewhat obvious takes from multiple depictions of Hell as spoilers, so keep that in mind, just assume they are all in there] is a library where people are tasked with answering an impossible question: What is Good? This sets up the three-faced metaphor. It is a concept we can simply grasp but in order to put in terms of academics we must tear upon the foundations of goodness, rendering it moot, and in the process tear up ourselves.
At the very end of Pride, a glitch happens. A man is smoking a pipe which becomes a cigar and then later morphs back into a pipe. If I was being generous, I would say this is part of Hell’s mutable landscape, but I am not being generous. After this moment, the text becomes meaner, less playful. We have a monster introduced needlessly. We have something akin more to a superpower than anything befitting this book of careful planning and plotting. Other text glitches occur soon after. Typos. The feeling that the book needed more editing and the suspicion that perhaps that is the problem: that editorial corrections somehow broke elements of the book.1
And the first major harbinger of what is to come is the fact that Desire is cruel in a way that Pride is not.
Kuang decides to spend the next 200 pages or so trying to convince us, the reader, to dislike everyone in the text as much as they dislike themselves. While it is obvious that Alice and Peter would not have tripped into Hell if their life was going perfectly; it is also unnecessary perhaps to have started a book with such a vibe and methodology and humor as this one does only to have it turn into a chapters-long slog of personal depression and betrayals. Kuang could have trusted as she did with that first allegory: the ivory wall which can be climbed.
Instead we are left with a long doldrum of wallowing.
Humans violate the Law of the Excluded Middle. Jacob Grimes is an ass who might have destroyed lives, but he is also a hero. Alice’s unfaltering worship of him is a type of hate (of both him and herself). Her love of him is both adoration but also repulsion. Peter and Alice, and the tagline “To Hell with Love” does posit this as something of a love story, complete each other in ways, but having someone rounding out your lacunae and your opposites is also a kind of argumentation.
The book eventually, past page 300, finds sparks of its former self. We learn why Alice and Peter have made their choices. We get paradoxes and equations back. We see tragedy and suffering not as wallowing but as forward momentum. Clever traps and ideas.
We come to a long section of the book where a famed city of Hell is an allegory for the faculty and grad student life. The inner circle. The point of the campus life and easily its most mockable characteristic.
Bespectacled assholes frit around writing long dissertations — publish or perish in a very literal sense — and trying to handwave their own transgressions through the logic which binds the world. Here we again see the first 100 pages. And it is glorious. All three heads of Cerberus are back on display.
One of my favorite exchanges happens here:
“But this isn’t at all a confession,” said the monocled Shade. “This is just a manifesto.”
“Well, I’ve nothing to confess.”
“Oh, why do you think you’re in Hell then, you idiot?”
“Now, now,” said the chairman. “Let us remain professional.”
It is so delightfully dark. Rivalling the best moments of folks like Terry Pratchett.
After this, we get to the various pay offs of the book and even if Alice has more soul searching to do [heh, a pun, by accident], then at least it is told in a way where we feel like we are along on a journey rather than a sitting-still. The monster never quite pays off, but the threads start to pull to pull tight
— getting maybe a slight bit too saccharine, but definite emotions always trump whatever the half-felt ones in the center of the book might be —
and I was left mostly satisfied. Not quite as in love with the book if the first fifth was combined with the final third with the middle bit reworked, but still. Satisfied.
I think this book is like its characters: flawed but ultimately human.
Hopefully it will one day get an edition that fixes some of the glitches, because that future version deserves to be held up for years to come.
- I even wonder if the book, so gently set in the 1980s where very little of the time is properly used except in spurts [sexism in higher learning has definitely not gone away], was shoved there later in part to justify some of the worse aspects of campus life since there are more safeguards now. Kuang’s brief author statement at the start even points out that she had to move one of the quoted authors decades back in time to make him fit. ↩︎