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A review by christopherc
Kim by Rudyard Kipling
4.0
Published in 1901, Rudyard Kipling's Kim is a tale of adventure set in a vividly-depicted colonial India. Its main character is Kimball O’Hara, a thirteen year-old orphan of Irish descent who has grown up on the streets of Lahore after his mother died in childbirth and his soldier father perished of alcoholism not long after.
In spite of his genes, young “Kim” is entirely Indian, more comfortable in Hindi-Urdu than English, culturally of the Subcontinent, and familiar with the Hindu and Muslim creeds while ignorant of Christianity. As the novel opens, Kim is hired by a Tibetan lama who has come down from the mountains to search for a rumoured river of healing. Going with the lama brings him to a British regiment who, discovering his past, are keen to take him off the streets and put him into a school. However, this is the height of the rivalry between Britain and Russia in Central Asia, the so-called “Great Game”, and Kim's ability to pass as a local is attractive to British intelligence.
Kim was originally viewed as a boy's novel. Certainly everything here is good, clean fun. As he is entrusted with furthering British interests in the Great Game, Kim packs a pistol to impress the young reader, but he never shoots anyone with it. There are a couple of mentions of courtesans to make the point that seduction has often been a spy's undoing, but never any sex scenes or even romance. However, the novel is no longer as accessible to a young audience as it once was. KIM assumes a knowledge of late 19th-century geopolitics that would have been current in the newspapers back then but is now mainly forgotten, and he uses some vocabulary that must have seemed rather archaic even at the time.
But while Kim's appeal as a boy’s novel today can be debated, its attraction to adult readers is great. Kipling draws a magnificent canvas of India's many castes, religions and local traditions, one often just as valid today as a century ago. One can tell that occasionally Kipling's observations are tainted by his colonialist views, but no ordinary racist would show such great ethnographic interest in a colonial territory and present it as such a beautiful country. With fits plot moving from the burning-ghats of Benares to the rice fields of the Punjab and the cold Himalayas, Kim shows how rich India is. Though Kipling is unable to overcome completely his colonial privilege, he manages to depict many faults of British administration.
The use of the lama is an interesting device, though eventually I found the character so tiresome that I've subtracted a star from my rating. I was struck by how many features of Tibetan Buddhism were already well known over a century ago, in spite of Tibet being closed to Western travellers at that time.
In spite of his genes, young “Kim” is entirely Indian, more comfortable in Hindi-Urdu than English, culturally of the Subcontinent, and familiar with the Hindu and Muslim creeds while ignorant of Christianity. As the novel opens, Kim is hired by a Tibetan lama who has come down from the mountains to search for a rumoured river of healing. Going with the lama brings him to a British regiment who, discovering his past, are keen to take him off the streets and put him into a school. However, this is the height of the rivalry between Britain and Russia in Central Asia, the so-called “Great Game”, and Kim's ability to pass as a local is attractive to British intelligence.
Kim was originally viewed as a boy's novel. Certainly everything here is good, clean fun. As he is entrusted with furthering British interests in the Great Game, Kim packs a pistol to impress the young reader, but he never shoots anyone with it. There are a couple of mentions of courtesans to make the point that seduction has often been a spy's undoing, but never any sex scenes or even romance. However, the novel is no longer as accessible to a young audience as it once was. KIM assumes a knowledge of late 19th-century geopolitics that would have been current in the newspapers back then but is now mainly forgotten, and he uses some vocabulary that must have seemed rather archaic even at the time.
But while Kim's appeal as a boy’s novel today can be debated, its attraction to adult readers is great. Kipling draws a magnificent canvas of India's many castes, religions and local traditions, one often just as valid today as a century ago. One can tell that occasionally Kipling's observations are tainted by his colonialist views, but no ordinary racist would show such great ethnographic interest in a colonial territory and present it as such a beautiful country. With fits plot moving from the burning-ghats of Benares to the rice fields of the Punjab and the cold Himalayas, Kim shows how rich India is. Though Kipling is unable to overcome completely his colonial privilege, he manages to depict many faults of British administration.
The use of the lama is an interesting device, though eventually I found the character so tiresome that I've subtracted a star from my rating. I was struck by how many features of Tibetan Buddhism were already well known over a century ago, in spite of Tibet being closed to Western travellers at that time.