R. F. Kuang · 2022 · exile

R. F. Kuang's alternate 1830s, in which Britain runs an empire on silver bars engraved with pairs of words that do not quite mean the same thing. A Cantonese orphan is brought to Oxford to feed the machine with a language it cannot grow at home - and is sent back to Canton to interpret for the Opium War.

1. 1
   Canton

   1828, and a boy's whole family dies of cholera in Guangzhou. An English professor arrives, saves him with a silver bar, gives him the name Robin Swift and takes him to England - which is presented as rescue and is also acquisition.

2. 2
   London

   Hampstead, and years of Latin, Greek and Mandarin drilled into him in a house where he is a project - the guardian who is almost certainly his father training him for an institution that needs native speakers and cannot grow them.

3. 3
   Oxford

   The Royal Institute of Translation, called Babel: a tower where silver bars are engraved with word-pairs that lose something in translation, and the lost meaning does work - which is how Britain powers an empire.

4. 4
   Canton

   Sent back with a translation delegation in the run-up to the Opium War, and made to interpret for the men forcing opium on his own country - the point at which Robin stops being able to hold the two halves of himself apart.

5. 5
   Oxford

   Back to the tower, and the choice the subtitle names: the necessity of violence. A strike by the translators would stop the silver, and stopping the silver would stop the empire - and Kuang does not let anyone off.