ARC review copy.

Katabasis is a book that seems rather dedicated to wasting its time reiterating to you, dear reader, that academia is difficult and fulfilling in equal measure, rather than being a book that is interesting to read. Katabasis is neither difficult to read or understand nor fulfilling to finish, it is simply boring - possibly the greatest crime of all.

As a setting, Hell is woefully boring to navigate as a reader. Everything is related to Cambridge in some way - the layers and their traversal pull from the aesthetic and grading system, and the shades the characters encounter are all obsessed in some way with their former lives as academics. This could be satire, or some form of commentary, but it never seems to be used in any sort of actually self-conscious way. The protagonists traverse the area with all the vigour of a couple who've spent two too many hours in IKEA looking through white and brown furniture. Hurdles they're meant to encounter are predictable and easily dealt with until the plot unjustifiably demands otherwise, even down to the finale.

There are many elements of this that should have worked for me, and in some places I can see glimmers of a book I might have enjoyed - loved, even. The characters as individuals are interesting on a surface level and I think the chapters dedicated to their respective backgrounds are the strongest in the novel, but the minute they're actually together, having discussions about boners and pizza anuses, they lose me entirely. I don't buy the romance OR the rivalry, bafflingly enough, especially when we're meant to believe that they've truly been in love, only mostly unaware of it, since the beginning of the book, despite the way they've treated each other throughout the novel. I don't find their actions particularly compelling, nor am I convinced by their emotional reactions to those actions. Side characters (of which there are three, if you include the cat) and antagonists are criminally underdeveloped given how much time is instead dedicated to pulling the names of long-dead philosophers, historians and authors out of a purposeless bucket to wave them in front of the reader's eyes like wool. The secondary antagonists have a really nice moment near the end of the novel that is shamefully less impactful than it should be given that the characters exist as basically a road bump to the main plot, and the confrontation with the primary antagonist has no real emotional punch because as readers, we know exactly how the fight will pan out.

Something about Katabasis just felt purposeless to me. In many ways, I think that Kuang's debut trilogy is still the most committed prose she's ever written, and she just doesn't really meet the measure in her other novels. Katabasis isn't necessarily bad - for the right reader, it will hit all the beats they need to be considered a good book. 2 stars does technically mean 'it was ok', but it's unfortunate that that is all Katabasis will ever really be to me.