Katabasis – A journey to the underworld, to Hell. It was supposed to take me in, get me hooked. It was supposed to present me a world from where my eyes wouldn’t tear off. A world where wild things happened, unannounced. A precipice that threw me into vertiginous depths wherein everything was alien, sterile black, or red. It was supposed to smear my mind with ancient spells and pulsating chants, to intervene my thinking with fierce blows and smoothest cuts. The journey was supposed to hold me agape, with its galloping outcomes and numbing truths. Even in the lowest of courts and highest of thrones, it was supposed to display me an order that would take my breath away. It was supposed to leave me exhilarated.
Don’t mistake me. It did all of this. ALL of this.
But what it did more is….it left me sanguine.
Bonds that shine in pitch dark clouds of chaos. Words that bind in the most slippery slopes of moral dilemmas. Resilience that glides on the thinnest of sheets. Promises that outlive their apportioned life.
Alice Law and Peter Murdoch emerged as the resplendent ambassadors of this elevating emotion in the entirety of this book. Alice – the brilliant, feisty girl from Cornell. Peter – the dorky, genius boy from Oxford.
I didn’t want it to end, just the way one doesn’t want a beautiful season to recede. Even though the season, in this case, unfolded in Hell. Hell, to where Alice and Peter descended for retrieving their dead Professor’s soul in order to receive his recommendation to complete their dissertation – a back-breaking, three year long, gruelling, single-minded expedition that both had undertaken at Cambridge University as PhD scholars of Analytic Magick.
“Perhaps the gift of rationality did not outweigh the debilitating agony that came with it.”
As I followed the journey these two fierce rivals took across the eight courts in Hell – Pride, Desire, Greed, Wrath, Violence, Cruelty, Tyranny and The Eighth Court, I couldn’t help but forget the settings. Because Hell was, after all, a custodian of our next forms. And so, the similarities were not far-fetched, and rather, felt, like home.
“Hell is a mirror.”
Wronged souls scheming for their revenge, brilliant souls extending help without motive, vain souls building an escape world, happy souls walking along as company, frustrated souls working furiously on their progress routes, worried souls deliberating to retain memories.
“For a moment she found this prospect terrifying… that memory was not a well-kept library, but rather a moth-eaten basement with dim, flickering lights – but remembered then that this was just how everyone lived all the time; how she herself had lived most of her life. You groped around in the dark. You settled for stories, not recordings. You made do with the bits you had and tried your best to fill the rest.”
Rebecca F Kuang suffuses their entire journey with a heady mix of logic and heart, because how else were they to advance?
Think Ramanujan’s Summation meeting Orpheus’ Map. Think Liar Paradox nestled next to Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence. Think Erichtho’s Spell in the court of Lord Yama’s Justice. Think Casimir Effect holding its own by the side of River Lethe. Also, think misogyny standing in the same corridor as solidarity, think betrayal locking eyes with sacrifice, think abuse running into courage, think duel feeling giddy alongside love. And did I say humor? Ah, yes. Plenty of it. Because we all deserve it, even in dire times.
I fell for Rebecca’s spirit. The spirit to write cacophony next to melody, and hoping her reader to choose the latter despite the dissonance, is not a given.
The book ends with this line – “And together they emerged, to rebehold the stars.”
Indeed. May we all emerge under such skies.
The book mentions a plethora of logical paradoxes, mathematical equations and scientific effects. I have put them together in a separate post for those interested to dive in.
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SEEMITA DAS 
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