Katabasis
By R.F. Kuang
Harper Voyager
ISBN: 978-0063446243
550pp.

Having gained considerable fame for books such as Yellowface (a satire on the publishing industry), Rebecca Kuang, more commonly known as R.F. Kuang, takes her readers on a journey to the underworld with her most recent novel Katabasis.

The term ‘katabasis’ literally means a journey to the underworld, whereby a living individual heroically goes all the way to the kingdom of the dead for a specific purpose. In classical mythology, some of the most famous examples of such heroes are Orpheus and Aeneas.

The novel, which is a work of fantasy set in the realm of an alternative reality, begins by noting that the protagonist Alice Law’s Cambridge adviser Jacob Grimes has been blown up due to a magical experiment that went horribly wrong. So devastating was the death that his eviscerated body and mutilated remains could only be collected in a bucket by the university’s janitorial scouts! Since Grimes was, unquestionably, one of the top names in Cambridge’s Department of Analytic Magick, Alice is dismayed at the prospect of having to shift to an inferior academic adviser, who will not be able to provide the references and connections that Grimes could have.

Unquestionably brilliant herself and undeniably driven, Alice sketches a complex pentagram and prepares to sojourn to the underworld, armed with a Perpetual Flask (of enchanted drinking water that never runs out) and Lembas Bread (highly enriched protein bars ideal for such macabre camping trips). Much to her dismay, another highly talented advisee of Grimes’, Peter Murdoch (originally educated at Oxford) shows up and insists on accompanying her to Hell.

After an academic adviser is blown up in a magical experiment, two of his students make a perilous journey to the underworld to rescue him in this fantasy novel

Kuang’s version of the underworld is a combination of that alluded to in Dante’s Inferno and Chinese mythology (one of its major deities is the grim god Yama or Yanluo Wang). She keeps her landscape logical and relatively simple. Alice and Peter are expected to proceed through seven levels of the underworld, namely Pride, Desire, Greed, Wrath, Violence, Cruelty and Tyranny, before ending up at the Eighth Court and pleading with Yama to return Dr Grimes to the land of the living. They have to be careful to avoid the waters of Lethe (which in Greek mythology was the river of forgetfulness) since the river has the ability to obliterate memories, purpose and consciousness.

Although they respect each other as academics, Alice and Peter squabble a great deal along the way about sundry topics, ranging from conundrums of logic to complex mathematical paradoxes. Their innate humanity and engaging interactions undeniably count as the best part of the book. Both ranked among Grimes’ best students, but he was a nasty and phenomenally egotistical man who subjected them to a great deal of emotional abuse and mental cruelty. Their intrepid journey ultimately ends up being less about retrieving Grimes and more about wrestling with their internal demons, which are symbolic of his unhealthy hold over them both.

Kuang does a wonderful job of depicting the power struggles that constitute the dark heart of academic life. Some of the major characters whom Peter and Alice encounter are the souls (referred to in the book as ‘Shades’ per classical tradition) of intellectually gifted individuals who killed themselves because they were unable to cope with the obscene pressures, jealousies and rivalries of the world’s highest ranking and most illustrious academic institutions.

For instance, a former advisee of Grimes, named Elspeth, could have had a very fine career had she not been irreparably damaged on the psychological level by the cruelty of her adviser. Fundamentally a decent woman, albeit batty and eccentric, Elspeth proves instrumental in helping Alice reach Yama.

“She was deep in Cruelty. At some point in the night she had made the crossing; perhaps the Escher trap had been at the border of Violence and Cruelty all along. The change was a difference not in kind, but in degree. Both were desert planes, but where Violence was harsh and mindless, Cruelty was littered with intention. Cruelty f****d with you on purpose. She kept coming across mysterious structures — interlacing bone, precipitously balanced, arranged occasionally like abstract art. Shapes carved out on the sand. Footsteps, maybe human, dancing in patterns she couldn’t make sense of.” — Excerpt from the book

One of the most memorable characters in the novel is Archimedes, a Cambridge cat, who can bridge the gulf between the world of the living and that of the dead. His sense of morality is more honourable than that of most of the human figures in the novel, including its protagonists. Neither Alice nor Peter, however, are as sadistic and demented as the Kripke trio, a pair of dark magicians and their son who prey on the more helpless beings in the underworld.

As it progresses, the book begins to display darker undertones. Much to their horror, Peter and Alice discover that it was due to their own errors that Grimes’ magical pentagram had ended up killing him. Any reader will ask himself or herself why Grimes didn’t notice a rookie mistake in the spell he was casting.

In order to appreciate this point, one needs to keep in mind that major academics tend to be notoriously careless about looking over academic minutiae. On a personal level, I was rather amused once, when I was working at the American University in Cairo, to find that an Egyptian secretary had changed the spelling of ‘Jane Austen’ in one of my missives to ‘Jane Austin’ and felt she had done me a great favour! Had I not been in the habit of meticulously checking drafts of my writing, I would not have noticed this and, while the error wouldn’t have got me killed, it would have made me a laughing-stock in certain circles.

Perhaps Kuang would have benefitted from keeping the novel shorter. There is an uneven nature to the work that might have been more excusable were she a less experienced novelist. For instance, the almost obsessive focus on conundrums of logic and magical pentagrams begins to grate on the nerves halfway through the book and, while the earlier levels of Hell such as Pride and Desire are painstakingly described, Tyranny barely makes a blip on the plot’s radar.

Alice, who appears to be an alter ego of Kuang herself (both are Westernised but have Chinese origins), is earnest and dedicated but also rather self-indulgent. After a while, Kuang seems less interested in refining a good adventure story and more invested in getting us to sympathise with how much Alice has been through.

Given that the author holds academic degrees from Georgetown, Oxford and Cambridge and is currently at Yale, perhaps one can understand that her creative vision is somewhat shackled by her personal academic experiences. However, the best and most visionary novels of the fantasy genre are never self-indulgent. Had that been the case with Frank Herbert’s Dune, it would never have won the Hugo and the Nebula awards.

I disagree with Olivie Blake’s marketing blurb that states Katabasis is destined to be a modern classic. Something that reads like a young-adult novel masquerading as a book for older adults, and which is part J.K. Rowling and part Dorothy Sayers in terms of literary flavour, requires more than good marketing in order to withstand the test of time. Depicting the heroine feeding desperately on a hapless cat’s viscera does not connote genius, and it takes a clear-headed mind to point out that, in this novel’s case, the emperor, while not precisely naked, is hardly looking resplendent.

However, there is no doubt in my mind that the book is entertaining, well-written, worth a read if one has time to spare, and helps to underscore that one doesn’t need to be white in order to be taken seriously by those who are. Katabasis’ implicit agenda, therefore, is political not literary. But given the freedom that creativity confers on all authors, great or small, Kuang need hardly be faulted for this.

The reviewer is Associate Professor of Social Sciences and Liberal Arts at the Institute of Business Administration. She has authored two collections of short stories, Timeless College Tales and Perennial College Tales, and a play, The Political Chess King

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, May 3rd, 2026