The first rule every graduate student learned was that at the base of every paradox there existed the truth. That you should never fully believe your own lie, for then you lost power over the pentagram. That magick was an act of tricking the world but not yourself. You had to hold two opposing beliefs in your head at once. [p. 229]
The novel opens with Alice Law, a postgrad in Cambridge's Department of Analytic Magick, drawing a pentagram that will take her to Hell. Her stated mission is to rescue the soul of her advisor, Professor Jacob Grimes, from Hell. Alice blames herself for his death: she didn't check that pentagram correctly. And without Grimes' mentorship and letters of recommendation, she won't be able to fulfil her ambitions.
But just before she closes the pentagram, an unwanted companion shows up. Peter Murdoch had been her closest friend and colleague, until he ghosted her. And it turns out he's also been researching Tartarology (the study of Hell), for much the same reason. Alice is not happy about his presence: but she concedes that he might be useful.
In Katabasis, the basis of magick is the paradox: Alice herself is a paradox, telling herself that everything is fine when actually she's falling apart at the seams, trying to balance the horrors of academia (long hours, poor pay, misogyny, sexism) against her self-image as a genius and a successful academic. (Peter, it turns out, is handling a similar, though less severe, crisis.) Hell, it turns out, is devoid of fire and brimstone but does resemble a university campus. The two sojourners encounter various threats and temptations, and Alice and Peter cooperate to conquer, outwit or flee Hell's manifold perils.
I enjoyed the Hell-building, particularly T S Eliot's 'The Waste Land' as a core text of Tartarology (Lewis Carroll also features) and the paradoxes. I also appreciated the way that Alice's Chinese background informed not only her magic, but her mode of encountering Hell's ruler. But I didn't much like Alice herself, even when it turned out that she hadn't been wholly honest about her motives: and I felt, as with Babel, that the horrors she'd experienced were hammered home too insistently. There's no nuance: we're just told, over and over. The final chapters felt rushed, too, with a deus ex machina flavour and a certain predictability. There is a happy ending but it doesn't feel wholly earned.
This reminded me in some ways of The Atlas Six (perhaps because of the friction between the leads), and in other ways of Ninth House (in which a character goes to Hell to retrieve another's soul). Perhaps those resonances coloured my expectations: I wanted to like it more than I actually did. The vividly-described death of an animal did not help.
I amused myself by trying to work out when this novel was set. Cambridge South station exists, but the NatWest tower is still being built; the music Peter likes is very much late 1980s/early 1990s, a range confirmed by Alice's TV viewing; Grimes' heyday was the 1960s, after brilliant work during WW2. On the other hand the Colossi of Memnon still sing at dawn, and in Britain people drive on the right. This is not our world.
“This is Lord Yama’s design. There’s a million things to keep a soul from writing, all in the service of making you better at it. Remember that, Alice Law. Hell is a writers’ market.” [p. 415
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