Katabasis: Impossible to Pronounce, Enjoyable to Read
Katabasis by R.F. Kuang (Harper Voyager, 2025)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Stice
“ ‘We have to make it count.’ She felt a lump in her throat. ‘All this, I mean. It has to be worth something. We can’t have done this all for nothing.’
‘Hm,’ said Peter.” (259)
Katabasis is a book full of dilemmas. A famous professor of magick at Cambridge is killed in an accident with a pentagram, leaving his top students, Alice and Peter, to an uncertain future. Separately, they decide to go to Hell and bring him back. Together, they begin their journey. All kinds of dilemmas follow. How to find Professor Grimes? How to travel through Hell? At least once, Peter and Alice find themselves in an actual, classic prisoner’s dilemma. Their questions about how to bring back their advisor are soon overtaken by questions about their own survival. It’s all complicated by their questions about each other. It’s rarely clear what they should do, or how.
Katabasis is set primarily in Hell, but the book is a nerd’s paradise. Kuang weaves together descent tales from across history, afterlife accounts from various traditions, references to classical and analytic philosophy, logic, and a rich account of Cambridge. In addition to taking magick as real, this book turns Orpheus into history rather than myth, T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland into a practical guide, and lembas bread into real-world food worth packing. We get small asides into the history of magick and the power of chalk, and references to familiar deities like King Yama.
Hell seems like a landscape prone to cruelty, but some of it is a relief for Peter and Alice. Yes, there are a lot of bones and even some evil underworld magicians, but their professor, Grimes, has been cruel to them both. As they reveal more of that to each other, Peter and Alice do it within the context of their own tense relationship. The Cambridge they have experienced has been filled with passion for ideas and the life of the mind. Alice is at Cambridge because what she really wants is “unhampered time and access to the necessary resources to think” (262). But both Alice and Peter have also found a fair amount of confusion and cruelty at the university.
Katabasis is seemingly all about unreality, but it has some roots in reality. This book has the potential to enthrall those who have been part of intense graduate programs and the collective psychosis that seems to govern them. Alice and Peter, and the other graduate students, will seemingly do anything for their advisor, so that they can get a “good” job, so that they can stay in academia. It represents access to learning and a way of life they cannot find anywhere else. Personal health and relationships matter less than prestige which is not even visible or understood outside of the ivory tower. Of course, this strange behavior is not entirely irrational, because advisors do have unnatural amounts of power over the lives and futures of their students. And the university ethos emphasizes the life of the mind almost to the extent of rejecting the body. The slippage between the fictional and the factual in student perspectives and experiences is equal parts uncomfortable and entertaining for those familiar with such things.
But you do not need years of graduate school to understand or appreciate this book. Despite its 541 pages, Katabasis is a fast read. It’s much easier and more enjoyable to get through the book than it is for the main characters to journey through Hell. And while Kuang has brought in classical history, philosophy, and some comparative religion, no real background is required to enjoy or understand the book. Alice and Peter have an adventure, encounter various Shades and smalltime deities, meet interesting people, and find time to have a love story. The elements are pretty familiar, even if the setting is unfamiliar.
As with any book about death and Hell, Katabasis prompts reflection on life. Various characters wrestle with the meaning of life and offer different answers. For the most part, the journey through Hell is a cautionary tale for Peter and Alice. But many characters are capable of moments of wisdom. Even the distasteful Grimes can tell Alice that she cannot get caught up in conferences and academic celebrity, “It’s got to be the work itself,” he tells her. “You’ve got to float above it all. You must be fueled by the truth, and the truth alone. It must devour you” (140). Of course, devouring normal things is also good. Another character, Elspeth, who imagines what she will do when she returns from Hell says, “I’m going to sit outside. I’m going to have a cup of tea, Assam, with lots of milk and a swirl of honey. And a cinnamon bun. With raisins” (276).
Katabasis is an entertaining adventure through Hell, which confirms that Hell is not a desirable vacation destination but also disabuses the reader about an irrational fear of death. Most of the suffering endured by the Shades seems closely related to reluctance to be reincarnated. Kuang offers two main characters worth caring about and the courts of Hell are creatively depicted, drawing on many different historical, mythical, and religious traditions for rich descriptions. Katabasis has enough mystery and tension to temporarily unsettle the reader and reward continuing the journey without creating lasting distress. Ultimately, Katabasis affirms conventional wisdom about the meaning of life and is a solid example of smart, enjoyable contemporary fiction.
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history and assistant director of the honors program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. When she can, she reads and writes about World War I and she is the author of Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War (2023).
