‘To hell with love’, such a great tag line with so many different ways to interpret and read it, much the same can be said for the contents of this book. Katabasis is a dark academia adventure following Alice and Peter, Cambridge post-grad students who are going to hell to bring back their professor. There’s some rivals to lovers romance going on, there’s a lot of discussions about philosophy and logic, there’s a really interested depiction of hell – Kuang has packed this book with so much it was a truly immersive and brilliant reading experience.
This was one of my most anticipated releases of the year having loved all of Kaung’s previous books, especially The Poppy War which is one of my favourite series of all time. As soon as we had the Escher stairs cover teased I knew this was going to be a brain stretching read and that it was. Kuang writes with such intelligence and really analysis her subject matter which means her books aren’t light reads, but she also does a really good job of making them not come across as too intense or challenging to understand. In short, I didn’t feel like a total idiot reading Katabasis, though the logic discussions had my brain hurting a little bit.
At the heart of this book is hell as depicted by R. F. Kuang and inspired by literary imaginations of past. Throughout this book’s journey our main characters are constantly referencing other writings of hell with some well known authors being referred to as magicians which was a really fun detail I enjoyed. Among these greats, Kaung has now added her own name and version of hell, which in itself is a brilliant meta moment to now be classed amongst those she was researching and studying. I loved the take Kaung had on hell and how she visualised it in her writing, it was immediately so clear in my head and such an interesting setting to learn more about.
The real highlight of this book for me was Alice and Peter and their relationship with each other. Initially the reader isn’t sure how close they are or how they feel about each other, but as the narrative goes on, we get more backstory to their friendship and its origins. I loved being fed this information as the book progressed, it was spaced out and slowly gave more context to each character as we learnt more about them. Peter is an absolutely sweetheart and I love him dearly, he was so likeable and genuine and it felt refreshing to see that he wasn’t this bad boy arsehole. Alice was our main narrator and is wrecked with guilt for a lot of this book which makes her unreliable to follow and therefore an interesting perspective. I also loved her name, Alice Law, to me Alice always brings to mind Alice in Wonderland, chaos, nonsense, madness and then Law, logic, structure, rules – whether or not that’s where Kuang was going with the contrast of her name, I loved it none the less.
Without going into spoilers, I’ll touch on the end of this book. This whole journey is about retrieving their professor and the moral obligations to do. We touch on multiple important conversations throughout as well, some brief, some a lot longer. Of course, being set in hell and around lost souls, there’s an overriding question of purpose and how we spend our lives. But what I found really fascinating toward the end of Katabasis was Kuang’s examination of what it means to be human and how we preserve our humanity. Through the dedication of several other characters in hell we see the definition of humanity being stretched very thin and how this changes and affects Alice and Peter. As the narrative progressed in a linear way, this question of being human in hell follows these two and ebbs away at them slowly.
Katabasis fascinated me from start to finish, I was constantly googling new things and learning about philosophy and logic in ways I hadn’t thought about before. You can’t help but critically read a book by R. F. Kuang and I was happy to have my brain stretched by this novel.
5 STARS!
