Katabasis

An interesting book about a journey through Hell by Cambridge University graduates to, of all things, retrieve their supervisor so they can finish their degrees. In this universe, magic is real and done by inscribing logical formulas around pentagrams. In her hurry, Alice Law may not have completed a pentagram properly, causing her supervisor to die in a pretty horrific manner. Now, she wants to journey to Hell to retrieve his soul so she can complete her magic studies, get recommended by him and get an academic post.

This may sound crazy to 'normal' people, but Alice is not normal. She is single-minded in wanting to graduate in magical linguistics, even if she has to debase herself and grovel under the constant demands of her supervisor to get it. Getting him back from Hell is just the next step in completing her studies. But then, a rival student, Peter Murdoch, a fellow magic student specialising in logic, joins her on her journey. Together, they must journey through the many levels of Hell to find him and then figure out a way to return to the world of the living.

In this world, the system of magic is based on stating and believing in paradoxes, which alter the state of the world in pentagrams created with magical chalk. This results in lots of mathematical paradoxes (like Zeno's paradox of motion) being featured in the book. For those not well versed in such paradoxes, this may be confusing, but it is a feature of this world.

There are also stretches of the book that focus on the characters' past, rather than the plot, to show how they both became students of magic in Cambridge under this supervisor, and how they became both friends and rivals, in an academic atmosphere where gossip about relationships between professors and students abound.

As they both journey through Hell, using their wits to overcome obstacles, they become aware that they are being hunted by beings who have designs on them: for in Hell, magic can also work, but it requires a rather different source to enable it.

In the end, Alice does find her supervisor. But by then, her experience of going through Hell to find him has changed her character, and she now has a different set of priorities.

A story about how academic life can be harsh on graduates and twist them into doing things that, in hindsight, may not have been good ideas. But in a world where graduating, getting published and achieving tenure are considered paramount, it may be understandable why Alice was the way she was. But now, after the journey, she has a chance to do things differently.

A tumbling of traumatic scenes in hell and in university, a logical-paradox-driven magick gives as many fun revisits to mathematical puzzles as to Dante's Inferno or the Rigveda. Less convinced of the plot and character motivations, but the pace keeps up well enough.