Babel characters

Appears from the start

A Chinese boy taken from Canton after cholera kills his mother. Professor Lovell gives him the English name Robin Swift and raises him in Britain for admission to Oxford's Royal Institute of Translation. Gifted with languages and dependent on Lovell's approval, Robin is caught between gratitude for his education and the prejudice and imperial ambition that sustain it.

Appears from the start

An Oxford professor who removes Robin from epidemic-stricken Canton and directs his education in England. Reserved, exacting, and often cruel when Robin disappoints him, he treats the boy's facility with Chinese as a resource to be cultivated for Babel.

Also known as Mrs Piper

First appears in chapter 2

The housekeeper in Lovell's London home. She provides Robin with daily care during his years of preparation, offering a steadier presence than his guardian while remaining part of the household that controls his future.

First appears in chapter 5

An Indian Muslim student in Robin's Oxford cohort and his roommate. Brilliant, sociable, and quick with a joke, Ramy understands that Babel values his languages without accepting him as an equal. He becomes Robin's closest friend.

First appears in chapter 5

A Haitian-born student raised in France and one of the four members of Robin's cohort. Her command of French and Creole makes her valuable to Babel, while her experience as a Black woman at Oxford makes her alert to exclusions her classmates can overlook.

Also known as Letty

First appears in chapter 5

A white English student in Robin's cohort. Her presence at Babel is unusual because Oxford restricts women, and she resents the limits imposed on her. She wants the four students to be intimate equals but does not initially grasp how race and empire shape her friends' lives differently from hers.

First appears in chapter 6

A senior white student at Babel whose confidence and social standing contrast with the newcomers' insecurity. His condescension toward students from the colonies exemplifies the attitudes that the institute treats as ordinary.

First appears in chapter 6

A Babel scholar who teaches Robin and his cohort the principles of silver-working: engraved pairs of words draw power from the imperfect correspondence between languages. Enthusiastic about linguistic ingenuity, he represents the intellectual excitement that makes the institute compelling to its students.

First appears in chapter 13

A mixed-race former Babel student who recruits Robin into the Hermes Society, an underground organization stealing silver and knowledge from the institute to resist British imperial expansion. He tells Robin that they share Professor Lovell as a father, linking their similar childhoods and divided loyalties.

First appears in chapter 14

A member of the Hermes Society who helps coordinate its Oxford operations. Anthony combines practical resistance work with an understanding of Babel's internal systems, showing Robin that opposition to the institute already exists within its orbit.

First appears in chapter 18

A woman teaching at Babel despite the university's restrictions on female scholars. She is sympathetic to students excluded by Oxford's hierarchies and understands both the uses and the dangers of the institute's language work.

First appears in chapter 21

A Qing official in Canton who opposes Britain's illegal opium trade and demands that foreign merchants surrender their stocks. His confrontation with British commercial interests exposes the political purpose behind Babel's translation mission.