What a delightful, happy book! I must admit from the outset that I was genuinely, truly, pleasantly surprised. Expecting something rigorous and regimented and archaic stylistically similar, say, to Poe or Lovecraft, I stared at Kim on my bookshelf for several months. True, it was not science fiction, my usual, comfortable reading oevre, but I do enjoy stepping out every now and then and reading the classics. Never having directly read a single word of Kipling’s, I knew him only by reputation, and only by a general and hazy positiveness to his work.
I loved reading every word of this, one of only four novels Kipling wrote, and his most successful, loved it immediately from the first paragraph. Something just clicked. The book is a joyous celebration of what I can only describe as that uncertain time between boyhood and manhood, in a time and a place where Kim shows no hesitation, no fear, no uncertainty. Just something like optimistic expectation. This is how life is intended to be lived.
Warning: If you are prone to hand-wringing and cannot read a book without immediately condemning it for doing what it never set out to do, do not read Kim. The India at the dawn of the 20th century was, as most know, under the thumb of the British Empire. There was an omnipresent, debilitating, inflexible caste system. Disease swept across the countryside. Poverty was wherever the eye fell upon. But to the shock of some literary critics, the book is not about imperialism, sickness, or destitution. It is also not about transcending them, either. The people of the novel accept these conditions, indeed, most thrive in the environment. The British are not viewed as the Oppressors, merely as a presence which can be used to one’s advantage if one had the wits and courage. I have heard and read that India is the most spiritual of all the world’s nations. From my limited readings I tend to believe it, and it shows in this work. It is part of the central theme of Kim.
The boy hero of the novel, our Kim, short for Kimball O’Hara, is the prototype street urchin in one of the busiest of the bustling cities of the central plains of India. Orphaned son of an Irish regimental officer, he makes his living hustling and doing precarious errands for one Mahbub Ali, a merchant of somewhat dubious and shady character, who ultimately turns out to be one of Kim’s secular mentors. In the first few pages of the novel Kim meets the lama, an abbot from a Tibetan monestary who is now a wandering pilgrim in search of a river that washes away sins and extricates one from the wheel of reincarnation. Some never-heard desire pulls inside Kim, and he becomes the lama’s chela, or disciple, and the most endearing, heart-tugging relationship I have ever read forms. Kim leads his master where his master cannot (basically, surviving in the world outside the monastery doors), and the lama assists in Kim’s spiritual maturity.
However, there are other parties interested in this quite capable thirteen-year-old boy. Ali uses him, and is, in fact, an agent of the British secret service when it is convenient for him. Before long Kim is discovered by members of his father’s regiment, who, thinking it in the boy’s interest, send him off for three years to “educate” him. The tearful separation from his beloved lama was an unexpected truly emotional part of the novel. But Kim, ever-resourceful, survives and thrives in the school, taking to the road on vacations so as to not lose his adopted identity as an Indian. One Colonel Creighton takes notice in his abilities, and he is sent to be trained in the art of espionage.
The best way to sum up the novel, I suppose, is to say it’s part Huckleberry Finn, part Tom Sawyer, part Don Quixote, all thrown into the rookie plot of, say, John LeCarre’s first unpublished spy effort. The book is filled with the tension of opposites: the Road and the School, the native Indians and the British sahibs, the Game and the River, the pull of politics and espionage, the the search for enlightenment. Despite the very colorful episodic nature of the novel, its most interesting aspects by far are the characters themselves, their relationships, and the beautiful backdrop of idealized India. The bonding of Kim and the lama, a temporal and spiritual surrogate father-son relationship, is the heart whereas the secular temptations represented by Mahbub Ali, Colonel Creighton, Lurgan Sahib, and the Babu form the ever-present outlying world that cannot be ignored and must be addressed.
The ultimate question of the novel is which path Kim will take. The final two or three pages, some of the loveliest prose I have ever read (it gives me goose bumps even thinking about it as I write this), yield tantalizing hints, but Kipling leaves it up for us to decide.
PS. I have a DVD of the 1950 adventure flick of Kim starring Errol Flynn (as Mahbub Ali) on hold at one of my local libraries and should be able to watch it in a couple of days. I am a little hesitant about doing so (similar to watching the filmed LotR series) because I would hate to have my memories comprised by an unworthy film effort. This Kim could be that since you generally don’t hear it spoken of when, say, the AFI shoots out its categorized Best-Of lists every now and then. But it’s pre-sixties Hollywood, so there’s also the chance it could be good. I’ll let you know one way or the other ...
I loved reading every word of this, one of only four novels Kipling wrote, and his most successful, loved it immediately from the first paragraph. Something just clicked. The book is a joyous celebration of what I can only describe as that uncertain time between boyhood and manhood, in a time and a place where Kim shows no hesitation, no fear, no uncertainty. Just something like optimistic expectation. This is how life is intended to be lived.
Warning: If you are prone to hand-wringing and cannot read a book without immediately condemning it for doing what it never set out to do, do not read Kim. The India at the dawn of the 20th century was, as most know, under the thumb of the British Empire. There was an omnipresent, debilitating, inflexible caste system. Disease swept across the countryside. Poverty was wherever the eye fell upon. But to the shock of some literary critics, the book is not about imperialism, sickness, or destitution. It is also not about transcending them, either. The people of the novel accept these conditions, indeed, most thrive in the environment. The British are not viewed as the Oppressors, merely as a presence which can be used to one’s advantage if one had the wits and courage. I have heard and read that India is the most spiritual of all the world’s nations. From my limited readings I tend to believe it, and it shows in this work. It is part of the central theme of Kim.
The boy hero of the novel, our Kim, short for Kimball O’Hara, is the prototype street urchin in one of the busiest of the bustling cities of the central plains of India. Orphaned son of an Irish regimental officer, he makes his living hustling and doing precarious errands for one Mahbub Ali, a merchant of somewhat dubious and shady character, who ultimately turns out to be one of Kim’s secular mentors. In the first few pages of the novel Kim meets the lama, an abbot from a Tibetan monestary who is now a wandering pilgrim in search of a river that washes away sins and extricates one from the wheel of reincarnation. Some never-heard desire pulls inside Kim, and he becomes the lama’s chela, or disciple, and the most endearing, heart-tugging relationship I have ever read forms. Kim leads his master where his master cannot (basically, surviving in the world outside the monastery doors), and the lama assists in Kim’s spiritual maturity.
However, there are other parties interested in this quite capable thirteen-year-old boy. Ali uses him, and is, in fact, an agent of the British secret service when it is convenient for him. Before long Kim is discovered by members of his father’s regiment, who, thinking it in the boy’s interest, send him off for three years to “educate” him. The tearful separation from his beloved lama was an unexpected truly emotional part of the novel. But Kim, ever-resourceful, survives and thrives in the school, taking to the road on vacations so as to not lose his adopted identity as an Indian. One Colonel Creighton takes notice in his abilities, and he is sent to be trained in the art of espionage.
The best way to sum up the novel, I suppose, is to say it’s part Huckleberry Finn, part Tom Sawyer, part Don Quixote, all thrown into the rookie plot of, say, John LeCarre’s first unpublished spy effort. The book is filled with the tension of opposites: the Road and the School, the native Indians and the British sahibs, the Game and the River, the pull of politics and espionage, the the search for enlightenment. Despite the very colorful episodic nature of the novel, its most interesting aspects by far are the characters themselves, their relationships, and the beautiful backdrop of idealized India. The bonding of Kim and the lama, a temporal and spiritual surrogate father-son relationship, is the heart whereas the secular temptations represented by Mahbub Ali, Colonel Creighton, Lurgan Sahib, and the Babu form the ever-present outlying world that cannot be ignored and must be addressed.
The ultimate question of the novel is which path Kim will take. The final two or three pages, some of the loveliest prose I have ever read (it gives me goose bumps even thinking about it as I write this), yield tantalizing hints, but Kipling leaves it up for us to decide.
PS. I have a DVD of the 1950 adventure flick of Kim starring Errol Flynn (as Mahbub Ali) on hold at one of my local libraries and should be able to watch it in a couple of days. I am a little hesitant about doing so (similar to watching the filmed LotR series) because I would hate to have my memories comprised by an unworthy film effort. This Kim could be that since you generally don’t hear it spoken of when, say, the AFI shoots out its categorized Best-Of lists every now and then. But it’s pre-sixties Hollywood, so there’s also the chance it could be good. I’ll let you know one way or the other ...
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