Rebecca F. Kuang’s sixth novel, Katabasis, transforms the mundane torments of postgraduate life into a literal journey through the underworld. The novel skewers the precarity of academic existence—endless grant applications, ignored emails from supervisors, and the slow erosion of hope that comes with clinging to the bottom rung of a career ladder that promises little advancement. Kuang, known for her unsubtle indictments of institutional rot, here delivers a campus farce with demons, blending David Lodge with Dante.
Kuang’s previous works, including the bestselling Yellowface and the cult hit Babel, have satirised the publishing industry and academia respectively. In Katabasis, she revisits the setting of Babel with a more fantastical twist: postgraduates Alice Law and Peter Murdoch, scholars in the arcane field of “analytic magick”, must retrieve the soul of their deceased supervisor from the underworld to save their academic futures. The novel is set in the 1980s, where theory is at its most self-consuming, and magick is a literal application of philosophy.
The core of the novel lies in its critique of self-delusion within academia. As Alice and Peter traverse the eight courts of hell, they confront how they have internalised the extractive logic of their institution—mistaking rivalry for strength, exploitation for meritocracy, and endurance for resilience. Their supervisor, Jacob Grimes, embodied this toxic system, and the quest to rescue him forces them to reckon with their own complicity.
Kuang’s prose is sharp and laden with in-jokes, references ranging from Lacan to Lembas bread. The novel celebrates the joy of intellectual acrobatics while condemning the cages institutions build for ideas. Katabasis is not subtle; it wields both rage and humour to expose the absurdities of academic life.
The novel ends on a note that echoes Babel’s fiery finale, but with a more ambiguous tone. Kuang remains faithful to the ideal of academia while scathing about its reality, making Katabasis a must-read for anyone who has ever felt broken by the scholarly grind.
