R.F Kuang has crafted an extraordinary and immersive world in her novel Katabasis, one in which the University of Cambridge houses a Department of Magick, staffed by brilliant professors and inhabited by graduate students whose research projects quite literally shape reality. Here, Magick and Logic are not opposites but partners—two interdependent systems whose relationship is as delicate as it is powerful. In this world, Dante's Inferno and the myth of Orpheus are not merely literary artefacts but functioning maps, guides to the underworld itself. At the heart of the novel is Alice Law, a gifted Ph.D. student working under the formidable Professor Jacob Grimes. When Grimes dies tragically, while undertaking a magic experiment devised by his students, Alice discovers that she must journey into the depths of hell to retrieve him. She is joined on this dangerous quest by fellow researcher Peter Murdock, and together, they pass through the successive courts of Pride, Desire, Greed, Wrath, Violence, Cruelty and Tyranny. Kuang uses this journey not merely as a plot device but as an exploration of the moral and spiritual architecture of evil, forcing both characters and readers to confront the many ways hell manifests in the human condition. One of the great joys of this novel is its setting. Kuang's portrait of Cambridge is vivid and affectionate, bringing to life cloisters, libraries and winding streets in a way that will stir nostalgia in anyone who has walked them. The use of logic problems as the raw material for spellcraft is as clever as it is imaginative, and the narrative tone—part Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, part Dante's Divine Comedy—keeps the story intellectually engaging while maintaining a brisk pace. The character development is equally strong. Alice and Peter's gradual journey towards greater self-awareness is compelling and emotionally resonant. Kuang's writing captures the vulnerability and resilience of early adulthood, when one's intellectual discoveries and personal wounds intersect in transformative ways. Certain scenes linger long after the book is closed: a moving description of a child growing up with Crohn's disease that evokes deep empathy; the honest and unflinching depiction of supervisory abuse and academic sexism; and Alice's own ambivalent relationship to feminism, which explores how the struggles of previous generations are sometimes taken for granted even as their fruits are enjoyed. Katabasis is, quite simply, a remarkable novel. It is an engrossing work of fantasy, yes, but also a profound meditation on morality, power and redemption. For readers interested in the great themes of heaven and hell, theology and philosophy, it is essential reading. Fantasy, Kuang reminds us, is not merely escapism; it is a form of truth-telling. Katabasis invites us to take seriously the worlds it conjures and to see, through them, the hidden contours of our own.
Ian S. Markham (Thu,) studied this question.