Alice Law and Peter Murdoch are graduate students at a magic school in Cambridge. When their professor dies in a horrific magical accident, they decide, for various personal reasons, to journey into Hell to retrieve his soul and bring him back.
I have a lot of mixed feelings about this book. On one hand, the premise is fascinating and thought-provoking. What if every account of Hell were true? What if Dante really journeyed through the nine circles? What if Orpheus descended into the underworld to retrieve Eurydice, or Aeneas crossed the River Styx? Alice draws on all of these interpretations while preparing for her own descent, and I was fully expecting an imaginative and magical underworld.
Unfortunately, that premise didn’t quite pay off. While the first two courts of Hell were creative and engaging, the rest felt increasingly underwhelming. Several of the later courts lacked description, and one came across as little more than an endless, barren wasteland. There were very few stakes involved; Alice and Peter mostly seemed to move easily from one court to the next, which took away a lot of the tension from the journey.
The opening chapters initially hooked me, but as the story went on, it began to lose some of its allure. The more we learned about Professor Grimes, the more I questioned why Alice and Peter were so determined to resurrect him. Both protagonists also felt surprisingly unremarkable. Despite everything we learn about them, neither character ever felt fully fleshed out or particularly compelling.
I also struggled with the magic system. Spells are cast by drawing pentagrams and then applying logic and mathematical proofs. While the author attempts to explain the way this works, it never quite clicked for me. It reminded me a lot of my college math classes, where we spent half a semester studying proofs.
All that said, I did enjoy this book more than it might sound. This was my first time reading R. F. Kuang, and while I didn’t love it, I’m still glad I picked it up. It was good, but not great, and I’ve heard Babel is much stronger, so I’ll likely be adding that to my TBR.
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