Hell, it turns out, looks a lot like graduate school. That is the sly, aching premise animating R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis, a novel that trades the imperial battlefields of her earlier work for something more intimate and no less punishing: the price a brilliant mind pays to keep climbing.
Alice Law is a doctoral candidate in analytic magick at Cambridge, and when her mentor, the formidable Professor Jacob Grimes, dies in a laboratory accident that may well be her fault, she does not mourn quietly. She descends into Hell to retrieve him, dragging along Peter Murdoch, her insufferably talented rival, because the descent requires two. What follows is a journey through eight distinct Courts of the underworld, each one a dark mirror of academic life: a library where scholars defend their theses for eternity, a storm-wracked union hall of collective desire, courts of greed, wrath, and cruelty that feel uncomfortably familiar to anyone who has sat through a dissertation defense. Kuang builds this cosmology with the same rigor she brought to the magic systems of Babel, except here the infrastructure is myth and the stakes are personal rather than geopolitical.
The novel’s real strength is its nerve. Kuang is unafraid to slow the plot to a crawl so Alice and Peter can argue about the ethics of ambition, the loneliness of intellectual life, and whether the sacrifices demanded by genius are worth making at all. Their prickly, competitive dynamic gives the book its pulse; watching two people who despise each other slowly become the only ones who understand each other is genuinely absorbing. The prose is precise and often very funny, particularly when Kuang is satirizing the petty cruelties of academic hierarchy. As a structural conceit, mapping Hell onto the shape of a PhD program is audacious, and when it lands, it lands hard.
Critics have been split on whether it lands consistently. Several major outlets praised the novel’s ambition and its unflinching look at the costs of academic life, with more than one reviewer highlighting its clear-eyed treatment of institutional dysfunction. Others found the descent structure repetitive over its considerable length, arguing that the philosophical debates between Alice and Peter, however sharp individually, pile up faster than the plot moves forward. A recurring critique is that the novel’s back half leans so heavily on argument and metaphor that momentum suffers, even as most agree the central relationship and the world-building remain the book’s strongest assets.
Katabasis is not the tightest book Kuang has written, but it may be her most personal, a story about what it costs to want to be the best in a room full of people who also want to be the best. Readers who loved the institutional bite of Babel will find a lot to chew on here, provided they’re willing to follow Kuang into some genuinely strange, slow-burning corners of Hell. It’s a demanding, ambitious novel that rewards patience more than speed-reading, and one that lingers.
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