Katabasis by R.F. Kuang | Review

Katabasis was a real ‘yes, but’ for me; everything I liked about it came with equal and oppositional drawbacks. The plot is clearly set out, but the pacing is bizarre. There’s strong world-building but the writing is often tedious to get through. The characters are literal geniuses but they are frustratingly bad at decision-making.

The strongest part of this book for me was the way it explores depression and anxiety. Alice is on the gifted-kid-to-burnout pipeline and she is mega depressed. It drives a lot of her decision-making, but she doesn’t really realise and as a canonical (late) Boomer, she’s living several decades before she was going to receive meaningful mental health intervention. I found a lot that rang true for me in Alice’s characterisation, especially in the more insidious ways that your mental health can deteriorate and how these stack to holistically ruin your life. (Finding the will to live, challenge level 10000: will a depressed person bother to make it back from literal Hell?)

On the other hand, the book gestures a lot at what it would like to say, but doesn’t commit to the landing. A lot of the broader trials of the book are rooted in the failures of second-wave feminism and it takes pains to dissect the different outlooks different women had at the time. Despite suggesting that Alice is Chinese, institutional racism is totally untouched — which ~could~ be commentary on the lack of intersectionality in second-wave feminism, but ultimately read more just as a lack of willingness to engage with it meaningfully. This omission also genuinely muddies the plot because a lot of Alice’s issues come from misogyny within the school and its population.

Odd politics aside, I still enjoyed the journey with Alice and Peter. Metaphysical Hell is weird and rightfully horrifying, and it’s left me with auditory echoes of bones clattering. The magic system is opaque but interesting, and there are some hilarious snipes in the characters’ bickering.

If you’ve had a wandering interest in Kuang’s books and have been looking for a more character-driven pick, this might be the one for you.