The American writer’s latest fantasy novel is a messy take on institutional satire – with a saccharine love story thrown in
In a 2004 essay, religious-studies scholar Charles Hallisey suggests that higher education is not unlike a religion – both involve institutionalised rituals, an understanding of personal lack and knowledge that can never be complete. It is in this space of devotion and penance that R.F. Kuang’s sixth novel, Katabasis, a thinly veiled satire of academic life, is set. This 500-page odyssey revolves around two Cambridge students of ‘Analytic Magick’, Alice and Peter, who head to Hell to retrieve their recently dead supervisor, so that they can finish their PhDs – and continue their quest as lifelong scholars.
Hell, as it turns out, is a campus, where each level, à la Dante’s Inferno, mirrors a university building through which ‘Shades’ must pass before they can submit their dissertations and ‘graduate’ to their next lives. Pride, for example, is a library in which Shades have breakdowns in fear of failing vivas; Desire is a student centre in which Shades snort books like cocaine and hump each other in study rooms. When Hell starts to feel unbearable, Alice takes comfort in the knowledge that ‘graduate school had prepared her for this, the constant managing of despair’.
Like her other novels featuring jealous, competitive nerds and effortless geniuses, Kuang is most comfortable turning the reality of intellectual life on its head, writing painful stereotypes until they become real and humane. As their journey into Hell unfolds, so does their toxic relationship with Professor Grimes, the supervisor who manipulated them into being consumed by self-doubt, as well as becoming rivals, despite their mutual infatuation. Grimes is a predator who sexually harassed his students (‘He likes girls who look like ballerinas… sad, twiggy things with daddy issues’) and stole their research. Despite that, Alice still bases her self-worth on his praise – so invested that ‘she could not tell where [his] malfeasance ended and where her complicity began’.
But as Kuang’s institutional satire meets heavy-duty Hell research and a saccharine love story, Katabasis becomes disjointed and full of loose ends. It reads like a Chicken Soup for the Soul story for the newly matriculated.
Katabasis by R.F. Kuang. Harper Voyager, £22 (hardcover)
From the October 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
