Katabasis, R. F. Kuang. Harper Voyager (ISBN: 9780063021471) 2025.
Summary: Two graduate students studying Magick follow their deceased advisor on a journey through Hell, struggling to trust each other.
Katabasis. The word refers to a descent into the underworld, a theme in mythology from the Odyssey and Aeneid to Ovid and Dante. In fact, just about every culture has its katabasis myths. And now R. F. kuang has given us one for dark academia in a post-post-modern twenty-first century.
The story, in brief, is about two doctoral students studying Magick at Cambridge, Alice Law and Peter Murdoch. Both work under Jacob Grimes, by many estimates, the greatest magician in academia. But he is not a nice man–manipulative and brutal, and many have dropped out. Murdoch and Law are determined not to, and are rivals. That is until an accident with a pentagram drawn by Alice rips his body apart and sends him to Hell.
The real disaster here is the loss of an advisor, which can mean starting over. Not only that, a recommendation from Grimes held the key to their futures, futures they had worked so hard to achieve. That is why they are willing to forfeit half of their life span to gain entrance to hell. Somehow, they hope to find Grimes and restore him to the upper world, at least long enough for those coveted degrees and recommendations. And the spell they use works to get them into Hell.
This novel is many things in one. Perhaps the dominant one is that it is an academic satire. Hell, as it appears to them is an academic campus. And it is one that reveals all the pretensions and petty rivalries of academia. For example, the first level, Pride, is not unlike a research library, with its inhabitants competing to compose theses that will allow them to move on, and perhaps across the River Lethe. But no one knows of any who have succeeded despite all the latest theories.
It’s also an adventure. Throughout the narrative, Alice and Peter are pursued by bony creatures energized by the Kripkes, extremely clever magicians who never made it in the academic world but were wildly successful in popular culture. Then there are others, like the Weaver Girl, who tests their loyalty to each other through posing them a Prisoner’s Dilemma challenge.
That challenge raises another aspect of the book. Kuang’s characters survive not merely by their wits and magical training. Throughout, they draw upon logic, philosophy, as well as a crash course in the mythology of the underworld. If you like intellectual puzzles, you will enjoy this.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma, exposes another element–their trust in one another. Alice discovers in some of Peter’s papers that it looks like he is prepared to sacrifice Alice to retrieve Grimes. And there is a long history to their rivalry, including a compromising moment between Alice and Grimes, witnessed by Murdoch. Everything seemed to come easy for him while Alice would grind away.
Finally, while many of Hell’s inhabitants seem oblivious to their sins, the journey lays bare those of Alice. She comes face to face with the overweening ambition behind her relentless pursuit of her degree–an ambition revealed in a willingness to harm others for her own ends.
Kuang portrays a Hell without a God or paradise, only a King Yama, on which their hope of return hinges. But the irony is that in the end, survival will depend on grace of a sort.
So what did I think? Having worked in college ministry with grad students and professors, Kuang’s satire of their pretensions as well as the portrayals of the delights of the life of the mind seemed spot on. As in the Poppy Wars trilogy, Kuang is a world builder. She has added to the mythology of the geography of Hell. Most of all, she explores flawed, fallen human nature, and our blindness to our flaws. And we watch her lead character grope toward the realization that in the end, the greatest virtue is love. But we wonder if she will learn in time.