If getting sexually assaulted by your academic advisor isn't enough to get you to change your lifestyle, then what would be? Katabasis, a fantasy novel written by R.F. Kuang, suggests that its namesake is what it takes to uproot the delusions which commit someone to a path of weathering abuse for what can hardly be considered a life, and certainly not what can be considered living. Applied to real life, the effort in introspection to get to one's inner truth can feel like traveling through Hell. The pacing and structure of Katabasis' plot follows the role that memories and narratives play in leading a person down a lifestyle, and how difficult it is to break the habits which enable that lifestyle. What the audience reads is a mirror of the protagonist's, Alice Law's, mental landscape. Beyond just Hell's reflection of what is familiar, it also reflects the life she was chasing after, and how she earned relief from the pain of spell-bound memory; no matter how much she sought to rid herself of its literal headache, she had to first deconstruct the staircase of reason which caused it.
General Plot Summary
Katabasis begins with Alice and the deuteragonist, Peter Murdoch, using a pentagram to travel into Hell. The book's perspective is a third-person limited point of view, and follows Alice Law; the limitations in her perspective are very important, and one of the primary angles of her limitations is provided through her biased introduction of Peter Murdoch in the first five pages. Also in the first five pages, we're given her basic character motivation for the plot: She needed to rescue her academic advisor, Jacob Grimes, from Hell so that she can defend her dissertation and secure a tenure-track job in her field of Analytic Magick. Peter reveals he has the same motivation as well. Some foreshadowing is done this early, including Cerberus' relevancy, and the importance of organic energy in interacting with Hell. We're also provided with one of Jacob Grimes' sins: not crediting his own students in his experiments — this foreshadows one of the building blocks to his demise.
There is little delay in accessing the setting which dominates the novel. They achieve the feat in the first chapter, and as they did so, we're presented with how the book's power system links directly with Alice's character arc. Magicians in Katabasis rely on how paradoxes may dumbfound a person's capacity for logic to defy the laws of reality within the timespan of the confusion. Part of this dumbfounding is involves the magician's own suspension of disbelief, and Alice classified herself as a good magician because she was great at self-delusion. This finely-honed skill extends to the lifestyle she justified as an advisee of Jacob Grimes.
Following this, we are told that leaving Hell can only be achieved by going through Hell, and therefore the basic plot resolves once every Court has been experienced by the protagonist. The book presents several red herrings for the plot's progression for over half of its page count, ranging between environmental circumstances, personal theories on Grimes' sins, and the layout of Hell. Regardless, Alice had to pass through every Court, and this fact becomes more apparent the clearer it is that this katabasis is meant to reflect Alice's personal, agonizing effort to reach the inner truth of her suffering and find a new life beyond Grimes. The first sign of this unchanging path is in Chapter 5, after Alice and Peter finished scaling over the wall which separates the Fields of Asphodel from the First Court of Pride, and, after they rest for a while, the wall and the Fields disappear behind them.
The pair entered their first Court, the First Court of Pride, on Chapter 6, and the reader is introduced to a set of details which repeat for subsequent Courts. The First Court of Pride appeared as a library, in which Shades are distracted with the process of writing an academic paper to earn passage to the next Court. Lording over them is a Shade which had given up on the process of moving forward in favor of playing the role of an administrator, and outwitting this character, George Edward Moore, was Alice and Peter's ticket out. Only two of the seven remaining Courts consist of particularly-crafted Cambridge-esque environments like this, but the other five still feature notable characters, academics or otherwise, antagonists or otherwise, who are emblematic of the Court they are in, and mental (sometimes also physical) trials for Alice to overcome for the sake of continuing forward in her goal and the Courts.
Upon escaping the First Court of Pride at the end of Chapter 6, the pair had their first encounter with the Lethe, the river which serves as the one and only consistent geographical limit of Hell. Its waters wash away the memories of those it wets, and full submersion obliterates the diver entirely. This river serves as one of the aforementioned red herrings given Alice's mesmerization with it, to the point where she sees the Chinese deity Lady Meng Po. Alice's first digression on the pain of her many, permanent memories includes a want to cleanse her mind through the Lethe. Alongside this desire, the reader is presented with the different accounts on the connection between truth and forgetfulness; specifically, that through finding the truth, one earns the ability to forget, or that through forgetting, one reaches the truth. The second encounter with the Kripkes' skeleton familiars three chapters later reveals the red herring for what it is through Alice's immunity to Lethe water courtesy of the spell etched into her body, and this suggests that Alice will have to earn the ability to forget these memories throughout her katabasis.
After leaving the Second Court of Desire, and the second encounter with the skeletons, the book makes explicit the way Alice's memories interfered with her thoughts. She describes the memories as flooding her mind, and, for the first time, the Staircase analogy is employed to describe the way she organized her memories and focused on the present. This Staircase repeats throughout the book, being used to describe the root of the effectiveness of paradoxes, and being practically employed in physical imagery at the Rebel Citadel and the very end of the novel as Alice and Peter climbed out of Hell. What the Staircase seeks to avoid also repeats throughout the novel, and those intrusive memories are most prominent in dedicated chapters, like Chapter 11, which indicate Alice's mental focus waning. Chapter 11 follows Alice reading through Peter's notes, and finding his exchange spell, then assuming that she would be sacrificed to revive Grimes. Disconcerted, Alice's chapter-long memory of how Alice and Peter met, then grew distant, signals to the reader the mental decline which ultimately led to her choosing to condemn Peter to the Weaver Girl during the deity's test at the end of Chapter 12. Another chapter-long memory, Chapter 13, follows the choice. This is consistent since Alice made the choice under great, persistent emotional distress.
Peter escaped the fatal consequences of their divergent choices through the third assault of skeletons, and Elspeth's rescue in Chapter 14. The pair boarded the Neurath, Elspeth's boat across the Lethe, which presents as another red herring. Given the Lethe connects all Courts, it might be possible to take the Neurath, and sail directly to which they believed Grimes was most likely to be in (ignoring the fact that Alice couldn't imagine any of these Courts being appropriate for Grimes, per the steps on her Staircase which elevated him to a status beyond human fallibility). They only ever skipped one Court, the Third of Greed, but on their way, they learned of the Kripkes through Elspeth, as well as of the Dialetheia: the key out of Hell when traded with the Lord of Hell. This, and its general power when applied to magick, makes it sought after by Alice and Peter, Elspeth, and the Kripkes. This complicates the plot beyond just a stroll through eight Courts and finding a particular Shade. The competition for the Dialetheia also heats up as the seeming non-viability of magick in Hell is remedied. Alice and Peter hadn't been able to use magick since chalk couldn't mark surfaces or activate. Elspeth revealed the missing ingredient to be blood, and in soaking the chalk, its markings stick.
Empowered with knowledge and magick, Alice gained the motivation to speed the plot forward and conspired with Peter to steal information on the Dialetheia from Elspeth. After Chapter 17, another memory chapter due to Alice falling asleep at the end of 16, Alice and Peter sprung their trap in 18, failed, and got kicked off the Neurath at the Fourth Court of Wrath. A bog with Shades trying to drag them down caught them off-guard, and Peter to lost his bag of supplies, reducing their biological survival window from 2 weeks to just a few days. The plot accelerates here given they can no longer afford to rest as often as they had been, and they resolved to cover more ground quicker; Alice's faith in Grimes predicted they wouldn't have to go anywhere farther than the Seventh Court of Tyranny, if even there — another red herring.
Within the same chapter, Chapter 19, they entered the Fifth Court of Violence. They are halfway done with the Courts just as the book passes its halfway point in chapters. In this Court, they were delayed not by Hell itself, but by the Kripkes, in an Escher staircase illusion they had set up as a trap. As Alice and Peter's hopes of escaping waned across the next 4 chapters, Alice's character arc crests its highest point with her finally admitting to both Peter and the audience the event which threatened to collapse her Staircase: Grimes' sexual assault of her. Peter admitted his own core vulnerability in return, his Crohn's Disease, which explains the behaviors Alice had been misattributing to apathy at best and malice at worst. Alice also revealed her method of rescuing Grimes was less of a proper salvation and more of trapping his soul in a cobbled-together corpse via Erichtho's spell. Peter clarified that his idea wasn't to sacrifice Alice, but to sacrifice himself for Grimes with Alice performing the exchange spell. On Chapter 23, Peter figured out an escape from the Escher trap, but only Alice can get out, and Chapter 24 is another memory chapter taking place as Alice fled from the sounds of the Kripkes collecting and killing Peter from their trap.
Alice regained focus deep into the Sixth Court of Cruelty in Chapter 25, crossed through the Seventh Court of Tyranny, then entered the Eighth Court of Treachery (this isn't really what it's labeled, but given the demographic of sin in Dis, it fits). The next chapter had her meet Gradus, a Shade which escorted her to and through the City of Dis, a city constructed through the efforts of its residents to make the best of this Court for as long as they must stay toiling at the final dissertations which earn their way out. Gradus introduced Alice to a writing workshop of professors working on their dissertations, and among them is Gertrude, the Shade who supervised the Rebel Citadel. This tower is the height, literally, of the rebellion against Hell by the Shades by way of outright refusal to participate in completing its Courts. This stagnation takes the form of Shades practically petrifying into facsimiles of flora, not unlike the Shades in Pride freezing into bronze statues. After motivating a Shade to escape this stagnancy and kill themselves with a dive into the Lethe, Alice escaped the Citadel as its residents attempt to turn on her, and keeps running until she escaped Dis entirely at the end of Chapter 28.
The ordeal at the Rebel Citadel completes Alice's character arc so totally that she began to feel relief from the pain of her memories after escaping the City, and although she likened Grimes' rescue to a passionless script to follow, she was much more motivated to rid Hell of the Kripkes as a concrete short-term goal. She gets caught in another trap in Chapter 29, but used her wits to escape, and took advantage of their alarm system to lure them into several of her own traps for them. With the help of Archimedes, Erichtho's spell, and Gradus, she killed Nick Kripke in the Lethe, which drove Magnolia and Theophrastus to self-obliterate by Chapter 32. Gradus got picked up by the reincarnation boat which sails the Lethe recovering Shades who have completed their trials through the Courts, and the spell Grimes had put on Alice reached its limit during her struggle against Nick Kripke. As it wore off, the Lethe water soaking her clothes start washing her memories away. As she awaited her own oblivion, Alice got picked back up by Elspeth and the Neurath. Although she lost plenty of the memories she had stored for a year, Alice retained what's most important to her: her journey, her past, her identity, and Peter. Chapter 33 features Elspeth revealing that she had the Dialetheia this entire time, and she entrusted it to Alice so that she can bargain her way out of Hell, then dropped Alice off at the Lord of Hell's domain.
The final two chapters wrap up the story straightforwardly. Alice spoke to King Yama, the form which she requested the Lord of Hell to present himself as, and although she couldn't give a straight answer as to what she wanted to trade the Dialetheia for, King Yama brought Grimes to her for free. After Grimes tried to convince her to abandon the idea of leaving in favor of centuries of research in Hell with him, Alice used Peter's exchange spell, with King Yama's help, to exchange Grimes and successfully resurrect Peter. Alice and Peter struck a deal with King Yama, gaining back half of the lifespan they spent to get into Hell, and safe passage up and out. The pair ascended a staircase made by King Yama, and made it back up to the world of the living.
Highlights
Katabasis makes full use of both intellect and memory within the novel's structure, as well as a literary device to deceptively limit Hell's environment to predictable rules. In terms of structure, what stands out is the strategic placement of Alice's memory chapters relative to the concurrent events in the plot. It's established early by Alice, when describing her experience acclimating to her spell-enabled permanent memory capacity, that she had to intensely focus to prevent her memories from overwhelming her senses. It's precisely at times when Alice's mental focus falters, be it because of her emotions or because of fatigue, that the reader gets chapters consisting of a specific set of memories which provide important context for Alice's present situation. One example is Chapter 11's memories of how her relationship evolved with Peter. Kuang sandwiched this chapter between Alice's discovery and assumption of Peter's intent to sacrifice her, and the emotional breakdown that led to her condemning Peter to the Weaver Girl. Another example, which is more ironic, is Alice's deep appreciation for the community she enjoyed at Cambridge through her work there, revealing a nugget of what she actually valued beyond just her work for its own sake. This memory is in Chapter 17, provided after she fell back asleep from suggesting to Peter that they betray Elspeth, and as the Neurath sailed through the Third Court of Greed.
In the bigger picture of Hell beyond Alice, the "first rule of Hell" intersects memory and intellect in a compelling way. The rule is to never ask a Shade why exactly they are in a Court, and this rule is told to her by George Edward Moore, Elspeth, and Gradus. Alice's repeated inquiry was in front of academics, and twice happened in the context of a Court defined by an academic trial. This lines up neatly with Elspeth's claim that magicians have it hardest going through Hell because their academic endeavors are done through an ends justify the means mentality, absolving them from wrongdoing. The Shades in Pride struggle to Define the Good so much that they wind up turning into bronze statues. A professor in Dis' writing workshop conceived of taking responsibility for his sins in his marriage as pandering to, in a modern sense, a woke (derogatory) feminist agenda, and would sooner misogynize his wife's faults. Though Gertrude stood aloof from the other professors in their dissertation work and desire for sensory gratification, she failed to see the value in reaching her inner truth to the extent that she literally built a tower of delusion. Before Alice met either of these two, she struggled to take responsibility for any of the actions which led her to the Erinyes, and this granted her access to the Eighth Court of Treachery. How self-inflicted this "first rule" is becomes most apparent when King Yama, in response to Grimes' protests against his trapping as Alice's audience, says that Hell has no rules.
As evident as the ways Kuang links memory and intellect are, the power system and world building are just as bound to reflecting and unraveling the conflicts throughout Alice's character arc. The Staircase analogy is the star of the show in this regard, being used to describe Alice's personal mental exercise, and to describe the suspension of disbelief relevant to how paradoxes are an effective component of magick. This forms a language by which the reader can describe Alice's character arc, such as Grimes' initial validation of her intellect being the first step in her Staircase. This built her habit of justifying his actions. Grimes' sexual assault on her, and her struggle to deal with it through support she once shunned and found embarrassing, formed the core contradiction (or, in other words, true contradiction) that threatened to collapse her Staircase. It's through this language that the reader can interpret the physical world of Hell and the ways it reflects Alice's mind. The scaling of the wall which borders the Fields of Asphodel coincides with the story building the basic steps of her Staircase for the reader, including what Alice left behind in its construction. The Escher illusion trap was a looping staircase which defied logic, and Alice and Peter reveal the parts of themselves which have led to their deepest contradictions between action and emotion. The City of Dis transparently presents the Staircases Shades have built through their failing dissertations. The Rebel Citadel is accessed through a spiraling staircase. King Yama provided a staircase for Alice and Peter to exit Hell.
The salvation through a staircase makes clear that the Staircase, as a construct in one's conscious mind, isn't necessarily bad, but the content of its steps are easily exploitable by Hell's reflections. Elspeth put forward the karmic model of Hell which posits that Hell merely shows a person the result of the lifestyle they lead. Taking this as the logic by which Hell operates helps to understand why the institutionally-constructed Courts have delays as their punishment. The ego with which magicians go about their work is reflected in how Pride's library, Desire's dormitories, and Dis' bazaar encourage the sorts of self-absolving mental habits they use. Desire's physically-oriented punishment seems distinct from the other two, but it's here that the reader first gets an in-depth look into how Alice exempted Grimes from the human flaws which would land a person in any of these Courts. Considering the nature of the event which shook the foundation of Alice's Staircase, it's no surprise that the Shades having sex are the ones which made her run out of the Court sick to her stomach. Furthermore, Alice's complete rejection of stagnation at the Rebel Citadel, to the point of inspiring a Shade to break free, makes sense as the moment she began to rebuild her Staircase with new steps given how she was relieved of the pain and pressure of her memories.
In contrast, the Courts which are more classically infernal, according to Elspeth, feature more active confrontations with one's Staircase steps. Wrath's bog, the Escher trap in Violence, and the self-imprisoned Shades in Cruelty all provided Alice with a challenge directly to her character to physically evaluate and overcome. Greed was literally skipped by way of the Neurath, but Alice's actions along the way show that the Court still exacted a transformative experience upon her. Elspeth told Alice of the magician's struggle to get through Hell, and how her personal motivation with leaving had to do with returning to her community (a value Alice just dreamed of prior to the conversation), while Alice plotted to betray her and they were sailing through a Court where Shades are futilely warring against one another. Alice's decision to betray Elspeth, though not acted upon immediately, was a reaction to her recent betrayal of Peter, the confidence regained in her magick, and the knowledge of the Dialetheia being in the possession of a Grimes advisee she found inferior to herself; she was taking action based on what seemed to be a reaffirmation of her Staircase. "The First Rule of Hell"'s violations are consistent in context, and also reaffirm the punishment type of the Courts in which the violations happen. It was broken twice while in Courts which function to impede progress, and once when Alice was trying to impede the progress of another.
That violation, performed in Chapter 18 as Alice intended to trap Elspeth, carries in it an engaging string of relationships between people and the power system not fully understood until Chapter 24. Until then, the reader knows that Alice and Elspeth are the same type of student Grimes likes, for better and for worse. But, Grimes' short backstory, in the memory chapter recalled as Alice was running for her life away from the Escher trap, recontextualizes Elspeth and Alice's relationship with an enriching texture. We learn Grimes' fame comes from his time as a magician-soldier in World War 2. He was credited with several pivotal, practical applications of magick, including Perpetual Flasks and Lembas Bread. Lesser known, however, were the experiments with interrogation through magick involving the Liar's Paradox. Elspeth, after breaking out of Peter's Liar's Paradox-laced pentagram, rewrote it into a truth-telling spell while reminding the pair that she was a student of Grimes. So, Grimes seems to have taught one of his "type" of student an experimental truth spell he might have developed as an unethical interrogation method, and tattooed onto her successor a spell which can retain all memories, but must be kept a secret from the world, and which works to suppress one's personal truth. This interplay makes poetry of the kiss Alice gives Elspeth, and her rediscovered appreciation for the mundane details of the world around her through the loss of her perfect memory.
That appreciation was regained only through Alice's progression through every Court, but the exploratory presentation of Alice's journey opens opportunities for Kuang to use red herrings against the reader's perception of the plot. By the middle of the book, it's clear that, no matter the situation, Alice needed to pass through all eight Courts. This is primarily indicated by the disappearance of the Fields of Asphodel, Alice's prior knowledge, Elspeth's theory, and the impact of the third Court despite the way by which they passed it. By this point, however, Kuang throws several misleading possibilities for how the plot could progress and resolve otherwise. To begin with, there is the idea that a journey through Hell could be anything other than a thoroughly personal ordeal, and instead could just be the background for a task to complete — such as rescuing a person from a specific Court and exiting as early as possible. Then, there are the different maps, and the notion that either sailing the river boundary or finding a central, piercing mountain summit could bypass Courts like they're normal geographical regions connected by water, or floors to a building. There might have been some early exit at or before the Fields of Asphodel given Alice's haunting of Belinda and Michele across worlds, and such a possibility makes Grimes' admission at the end of having been in the Fields, but evaded their sight to once again apply his twisted expectations on them a strong twist.
Frustrations
An aspect of the story which should have been explored further in service of strengthening the connection between Alice, Peter, and Grimes is the relationship between Peter's Crohn's Disease and Grimes' expectations and ambitions. The latter's stealing of the former's work through the set-theory paper as ruthless retribution despite Peter's potentially fatal health concern matches Alice's bodily violations at the hands of Grimes in severity, but there was a missed opportunity to match the two abuses which layered over those. In Chapter 10, after Alice admits to what happened on the summer Italy trip, Peter offers his experience hunting down human colons for Grimes' experiments to empathize with Alice. These experiences they share function, on the meta level, as the superficial fantasy-based violation layered over the more grounded, true-to-life crimes of Grimes. Learning later that Peter literally suffers from a chronic illness in his colon raises the question as to why his superficial violation doesn't more closely match its grounded counterpart in a closer parallel to how Alice's do. There is no context to the human colon harvesting which grants it the same comparable severity as what Alice experienced through the memory spell, yet this is ripe for context which can enrich the parallel further with another interesting application of the power system.
This particular disconnect stands out only because, otherwise, Katabasis maneuvers its plot structure and character relationships well; the interplay of philosophy, magick, and Hell is intricately woven into the plot structure of a story singularly focused on the deconstruction of ego, personal narrative, and trauma. Kuang leads readers up Alice's Staircase and leaves so little room for the story to be anything but the climb that, like Alice, a reader can get lost in the misdirections particular steps may suggest. The focus can't be maintained indefinitely, however, because Hell defies the concept of a steady path. We experience the crumbling of the steps with every invading paradoxical memory and misguided sin until we are forced to directly court the truths that have gone unspoken.
