Sagas & Sass began covering The Books of Babel by Josiah Bancroft in January 2022; this is our summary of book 1 – Senlin Ascends – as it was written to introduce Episode 34 (covering parts 1 and 2 of Senlin Ascends) and Episode 35 (covering part 3 of Senlin Ascends).
AHOY! SPOILERS AHEAD! (…obviously)
Senlin Ascends is a book about Thomas Senlin, who is a super awkward know-it-all schoolmaster who kinda creepily falls in love with and marries one of his former students, Marya, who is ten years younger than him. The story really begins when they head off to the Tower of Babel for their honeymoon, and despite the fact that Senlin has obsessively studied the Tower, it turns out that everything he’s read is mostly BS and he really doesn’t know much of anything about it. He immediately loses sight of Marya and spends days searching the market at the base of the Tower before finally deciding she must have gone inside.
So Senlin enters the Tower’s lowest level, called the Basement, where he immediately makes mistake number two by trusting a young man named Adam who then robs him. “Luckily” ::wink wink:: he goes to buy a change of clothes and runs into a man named Finn Goll selling one of his bags. Goll returns the bag and they go drinking together, which sounds like fun because the beer is free, but you also have to work for it by peddling this sort of merry-go-round thing, which sounds like trying to ride the Teacups at Disney World after you’ve had a bunch to drink so no thanks, amiright?
Finally Senlin ascends (ha! See what we did there?) to the second level, which turns out to be a lot like Sleep No More in New York City… only with murder and stuff. The tl;dr of this level – which is called the Parlor – is that it’s a play in which every person who arrives at the Parlor has to play a part. Oh, and they’re supposed to be stuck doing so for a whole week, though Senlin doesn’t last that long cuz, ya know, the aforementioned murder and stuff.
Senlin escapes with one of the other “actors”, a woman named Edith, but they weren’t supposed to leave NO MATTER WHAT so they get locked in a metal cage that hangs outside of the tower until someone reviews their case.
As it turns out, Senlin is released because he remembered to stoke the fires, but Edith didn’t fulfill her role, so she is sentenced to branding and banishment from the tower. Senlin, Nice Guy(™) that he is, stays with her while she’s branded but the powers that be (whoever they are) insist that he leave soon after she passes out from the pain.
Next up is the Baths, and Senlin finally feels like he’s ascended (HAR! HAR!) to a place that represents what he REALLY thought the Tower would be like, because it’s, like, fancy and stuff. At first he spends his time going from hotel to hotel inquiring about Marya, but eventually he loses hope – and it’s then that he meets a man named Tarrou. They become fast friends and for a while Senlin does nothing but hang out by the fountains and wine and dine with his new BFF.
Unfortunately Senlin begins running out of money, and also experiences some pretty disturbing things, including a public execution and discovering a book that details what is essentially a Tower-based sex trafficking ring. FUCKING GROSS.
And then – Finally! – a sign of Marya! Tarrou gets drunk and knocks over a painter’s work in progress, and the woman in the painting looks just like Senlin’s lost wife! So Senlin spills his beans to the painter, Ogier, who then admits that he paid Marya to sit for him but refuses to go into any more detail unless Senlin recovers a painting that was stolen from him by the Commissioner.
What follows could on its own be the plot of a very weird heist movie, but the tl;dr is that eventually Senlin gets ahold of the painting. On his way to return it to Ogier, he sees Tarrou being turned into a hod – a person who has become indebted to the Tower and is therefore forced into what is essentially indentured servitude. Of course Senlin himself can’t do anything, and continues on his way to meet with the painter.
Once Ogier has his painting back, he admits that Marya disappeared after telling him that she had met with a man who claimed he could help her locate her husband. It’s basically totally obvious that Marya fell in with one of the people who runs the trafficking ring, probably after catching the notice of a wealthy man who saw her play piano at a party.
At this point Senlin has attracted like wayyyyyy too much attention, plus he has to keep ascending in the Tower in hopes of eventually catching up with Marya, so we close out part 2 with him, shall we say, on his way to leveling up.
Senlin escapes from the Baths on an airship – one that happens to be filled with women who are on their way to be, well, sold, in New Babel. Upon his arrival there, Senlin immediately bungles things by signing his name into the New Babel register – not a NEW false one, which woulda been smart – and is immediately chased down by an Amazon-like woman. And to make matters worse, she doesn’t even catch him until AFTER he stumbles into a drug den and gets high on an opium-like substance called crumb.
Senlin awakes in the presence of the Amazon, who is named Iren, and none other than Finn Goll, who he met in the basement. Thankfully for Senlin, though, it doesn’t seem to be as dire of a situation as we’d think – Finn actually offers to hire him to manage his books, and Senlin DEFINITELY needs the money, so they strike a deal…
…only for Senlin to find out that Adam, the young man who robbed him back in the basement, works for Finn as well! However Senlin is forgiving – possibly stupidly so – and the two actually become friends. Time passes, Senlin is doing a great job working for Finn, and in exchange for fighting lessons from Iren, he begins teaching her how to read.
Eventually Adam finally tells Senlin his own story – that being that he came to the Tower with his sister Voleta after their father died. He signed what he thought was a work contract, but it turned out that he was duped and owed his “employer” money instead. He lost Voleta to a man named Rodion who runs a brothel in New Babel, and while Voleta has so far only had to perform as an acrobat in Rodion’s show, that man is constantly holding it over Adam’s head that he can sell Voleta’s virginity any time he wants. So Adam, who in the course of his ascent through the tower has been branded AND lost an eye, has been working hard to free his sister…but is losing hope because, well, isn’t it obvious that the Tower works against people like him? And Voleta? And Senlin? And so on and so forth?
Of course Senlin is still itching to go after Marya, so he decides he’s going to steal a ship and recruit some of Finn Goll’s men to sail it. Is his plan good? Proooobably not, and it doesn’t help that in the midst of everything the Commissioner’s executioner, the Red Hand, shows up for the painting Senlin stole. Which we all know Senlin doesn’t have. What he DOES have is Ogier’s key gun, which he uses to shoot the Red Hand, but the executioner escapes. The upside is that this leads Senlin to discover that Ogier actually stowed his prized painting behind the one of Marya, with a note saying to keep it safe because it is the key to the Tower…and to happiness.
Not that happiness is gonna find Senlin – or vice versa – any time soon. Because to top it all off, Finn Goll finds out that Senlin is teaching Iren to read and Does. Not. Like. Between this, the encounter with the Red Hand, and Rodion’s escalating threats about Voleta, it’s obviously past time to get the eff out of New Babel…except that when Senlin finally decides which ship to steal, EDITH of all people shows up to throw a wrench in his plans! Edith, who is now first mate on a pirate airship and boasts a super cool mechanical brass arm!
Senlin figures that now the better option is to steal the pirate airship, the Stone Cloud, because…why not? Edith can even be part of his crew, right? For some reason – somewhat misplaced loyalty, perhaps – Edith agrees to help him, but this IS Senlin, and they ARE in the Tower, so obviously things can’t just happened as planned. Instead, Senlin is summoned to Finn’s house, a little spot of paradise in New Babel where he lives…with his wife and CHILDREN?! Who could have seen that coming?
Now, before leaving his rooms, Senlin had insisted on putting on his coat, in which the key-gun and the paintings are concealed. He considers shooting Finn but decides against it because, ya know, kids and all. Instead he makes his way to the port, where chaos quickly ensues when Rodion shoots the pirate ship captain, Senlin finds out that Adam was the one who betrayed him to the Commissioner, Senlin shoots Rodion, the Commissioner arrives, a crate of crumb is broken open, everyone gets high AF, and Iren is critically injured…
And yet, somehow Senlin, Edith, Adam, and Voleta escape! They sail away on the Stone Cloud, presumably to help Senlin rescue Marya, though at this point Senlin is more worried than ever about the state he will find his wife in…
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Quotes we loved:
“I’d rather be a nothing at the center of everything than a puffed-up somebody at the edge of it all.” – Marya
“It was a nightmare. The plot was exactly the sort of tart melodrama he discouraged his students from reading. The subtext was obvious: Love, purse and eternal, reigned supreme. Senlin did not believe in that sort of love: sudden and selfish and insatiable. Love, as the poets so often painted it, was just bald lust wearing a pompous wig. He believed true love was more like an education: It was deep and subtle and never complete.”
“The gaps are part of the set, too…You can’t replace them. I know how each piece was broken or lost. I broke a plate myself when I was nine. Now I’m an immortal part of the pattern. I’ll take my gaps, thank you.”
“Marya, I…I have a difficult time expressing certain…genuinely held feelings…You’ve made it impossible for me to read a book in peace. When you’re not here, I just gaze at the words until they tumble off the page into a puddle in my lap. Instead of reading, I sit there and review the hours of the day I spent in your company, and I am more charmed by that story than anything the author has scribbled down. I have never been lonely in my life, but you have made me lonely. When you are gone, I am a moping ruin. I thought I understood the world well. But you have made it all mysterious again. And it’s unnerving and frightening and wonderful, and I want it to continue. I want all your mysteries. And if I could, I would give you a hundred pianos.”
“They’re all pig farmers and grocers in royal drag.”
“Heaven protect me from the spring cleaning of a man’s conscience! Don’t seethe at me, Headmaster. I’m glad your self-righteousness has given you some exercise, but you forget: We are not such a tidy, reasonable, and humane race. Our thoughts don’t stand in grammatical rows, our hearts don’t draw equations, our consciences don’t have the benefit of historians whispering the answers to us. Oh, stuff your outrage! You overlook the beautiful and exaggerate the evil.”
“Pride is a funny thing…It’s enjoyed most by those who deserve it least.”
“I don’t trust critics who like everything. If everything is good, nothing has any value. Without garbage, there is no gold, is it not so?”
“One shouldn’t feel compelled to attend every ball,or accept every proposal, or finish every glass that is raised. The sun is sometimes brighter when watched from the shadows. Sometimes to enjoy a scene fully, we must first retreat a little way.”
“It is better to be pleased by one’s own distastefulness than to please another man’s tastes.”
“It’s easier to accept who you’ve become than to recollect who you were.”
“Powerful men fail just as much, if not more often, than the failures. The exceptional thing is that they admit it; they take and hold up their failures. They claim their disappointments; they move on!”
“An ancient and beloved teacher once told me that a journal is the only book a man can undertake and know for certain he will one day finish.”
“She had to rediscover fear and, tucked somewhere inside that fear, life.”
“…as is often the case with men, once the silence has been broken, it can’t be recovered until everything has been said.”
“Mirrors are not so honest as one might think. They can be mugged at, bargained with, and one can always ferret out a flattering angle. Really, there is nothing like the expression of a long-lost friend to reflect the honest state of your affairs.”
“We shouldn’t have to go around congratulating each other for behaving with basic human dignity.”
