Katabasis is a novel about a journey into Hell, as two analytic magick students find themselves venturing into the unknown to bring back their PhD supervisor. Alice Law is an outsider—an American in Cambridge surrounded by white male academics—who wants to succeed, but when the death of her supervisor throws her goals into question, she researches how to get into Hell and find him. And suddenly, as she sets off, she finds her academic rival and once-friend Peter Murdoch is coming too. The two of them must debate texts about Hell, philosophy, logic, and everything else that makes up the magic they do if they have any hope of getting through Hell and having the life they want at the end of it.
Having read Kuang’s earlier Babel and Yellowface, I was assuming Katabasis was going to be similar to Babel, especially as it is very much marketed as dark academia. The “dark academia” label is basically meaningless by now, but I would say that despite both being about magic (and different kinds of fascinating magic at that) and Oxbridge, Babel and Katabasis are very different. Katabasis is what I want to call very affectionately “pretentious trash”, in that it is full of references to literary texts and philosophy and academia, but it is also a ridiculous story of two academic rivals who secretly like each other journeying through Hell. That’s not to say it doesn’t have plenty of serious things to say, about academic burnout and power structures and the misogyny and prejudices of academia, but it isn’t as deep as Babel and it isn’t trying to be.
The narrative is pretty simple, with a few twists and turns but mostly being a classic journey structure, with the characters meeting others along the way and things coming back to be relevant. The romance side of things is pretty low key, but it is also part of Alice’s wider need to realise there are things outside of just being the best in her field of magic. I enjoyed all of the references to literature about Hell and the way in which real texts and authors, both fictional and non-fictional, are a key part of the magic and mythology of Katabasis‘ world. The main issue I had with this book is that as someone who is British and knows Oxbridge fairly well, there’s a number of misused terms/references (mostly in a UK vs US way) that might be intentional (as Alice is American) or might be picked up later (as I read a proof copy), but for me that sort of mistake does pull me out of the story, especially as initially I didn’t realise Alice was American.
Even though Katabasis is a long novel, I found it gripping and fun to read. I love books about Hell and I enjoy reading about pretentious people having drama at elite universities, so I think I was always going to like Katabasis as long as it didn’t mess up on those elements, and for me, it fulfilled the kind of book I wanted it to be. Babel is probably a better novel (and I find myself telling people about its magic system and how it relates to colonialism quite often), but Katabasis just ticked off a lot of boxes for things I enjoy. Basically, if you want a Cambridge students of magic go to Hell book, this is a lot of fun.
Fiendfully Reading 
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