Engaging story from a bygone era. Interesting backdrop to current events in the mideast.

I have no idea what the hell I just read.

Kipling's ability to capture the varied characters of the book is truly amazing. The Lama's statements, always profound. And Kim's transition from childhood to being a young man well portrayed. Including the slips back at times when he feared for the Lama's death. Cosham did an absolutely incredible job with the many voices, accents etc. Hard to believe it was just one narrator. When I listened to this back in 1999 I didn’t like it much. Then I liked it much more in 2012. Now I’m rating it a 5. Don’t know if it was my changing or just the different stages of life at the time of my reading which have altered my perspectives. I think I like where I’m at now.

I have an odd relationship with this book. I first read it when I was a boy, probably younger than Kim when he meets his lama at the beginning of the story. At that time, I knew nothing of India or Pakistan, or Afghanistan or Tibet, nothing of Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism, let alone Sikhs or Jains. To me, the world of Kim was like the world of Ged in [b:A Wizard of Earthsea|13642|A Wizard of Earthsea (Earthsea Cycle, #1)|Ursula K. Le Guin|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1353424536s/13642.jpg|113603]: a fantastic creation of the imagination, with rules and magic of its own. It had the additional benefit of sending me to the dictionary again and again, to learn the meanings of words like theodolite and bonze.

Now I've read the book again, for the Guardian 100o book club here on Goodreads, and while it brings me back to childhood days, it makes me wonder about questions I'd never considered before. The author, [a:Rudyard Kipling|6989|Rudyard Kipling|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1183237590p2/6989.jpg], displays his love for the region and its masala mix of cultures and languages at every turn. It's unmistakable, and it's part of the magic of the book. Is he like Kim, the "Sahib" who has become more comfortable among the "natives" than among his own?

And yet Kipling is also famously the author of the poem The White Man's Burden. The poem, and the phrase, have been used to justify colonalism and imperialism, and they certainly reek of the assumption of superiority. The emotion that stands out from the poem is frustration, however, not pride. I love India, he seems to say, but it does not love me back. I have to soldier on in spite of that, for its own good.

So now I wonder whether people throughout the subcontinent still read this book, and what they think of Kim, and Teshoo Lama, and Mahmud Ali, and Hurree Baba, and especially of the Great Game played between England and Russia where their own lands were the playing field.

Kim is classified sometimes as a child's adventure novel. I'm not sure any modern child could get through this thing. It is long and dense, plagued by the same problem a lot of early 20th century novels have with overwriting, and full of descriptions of Indian religions and Indian culture and Indian titles for royalty.

The book is funny in a mischievous kind of way in the first half, but loses the playfulness of Kim in the second half as he takes on a more serious "adventure." I think the book suffers a bit in this way because we lose the cunning and cleverness of the main character the author has built up to that point and we never really see it return.

I think the most prominent theme I picked up from this book is the idea of race and empathy. Kipling describes the race of every single character you meet throughout the entire novel. Every one. Kim himself is described as Irish but passing for Indian most of the time. Maybe Kipling was making a statement here that race is important enough to be called out upon initial meeting because it is something that would be noticed (especially in British India) but all that really matters is the compassion we show for each other.

Multiple times throughout the novel, characters are shunned for doing wicked things to each other (beating, stealing, name calling) and other characters praised for the compassion they show regardless of race or religion. Race and religion are initial identifiers, but the way people are treated in Kim is ultimately determined by the behavior they exhibit unto others.

Kim is only an alright novel to me. Sometimes it can be a slough to get through, which should never be the case for an "adventure" novel. King Solomon's Mines was written around this same time and I never felt the dragging pace in that novel the way I do here. It gets 3 stars from for its initial humor and the intricate exploration of themes still relevant today.

Abandoned - for now anyways - at page 230 of 306. I had intended to finish it, and to an extent I am enjoying it. It is slow going though, and I have mostly absorbed the novel's charms by now. The last few chapters have just been completing that which was long ago set in motion. In any case, my reading and work schedules are already quite full, and a library copy of "Dune" has been sitting there taunting me for the last week. Time to move along.

As for Kim itself, I will say that its depiction of India is justly famous. Though it is viewed through an imperialist prism* (Kipling is the man who wrote "The White Man's Burden", after all), it is by and large an attempt to depict India on its own terms. I also enjoyed Kim's hijinks, for a time. But the reader is kept at too great a distance, some of the cultural terms are too foreign to me, and the value system is just a touch too antiquated for me to really grab on to it. Frankly, though "Kim" has traditionally been held up as a canonical text, I suspect its days in such company are numbered. We're rather past the time that an exploration of a non-white part of the world is, on its own, a source of wonderment.

Still, if I ever get around to reading "India After Gandhi" I may return to this as a gentle primer for immersion into that society.

2.5/5

*An aside: "lens" is of course the more precise word here, but it has been so overused by uninspired academics of the anointed class [heavy sarcasm here] - particularly within the field of of education - that I now refuse to use it on aesthetic grounds.

As far as it has been identified as the first spy novel (and technically, probably is) you have to look pretty hard for the stuff that is actually spying - and en extensive knowledge of the relations between England, India, and Russia helps.

As a study of a young boy with few roots and his relationship to a master spy and a holy man, it's lovely.

So Kim is a white orphan raised as an native Indian who meets a Buddhist monk when he is 13. He becomes the monk's chela in the monk's quest to find the river of enlightenment. Along the way, Kim discovers he is the son of a regimental man and is forced to attend a Western school for a couple years. He bides his time at the school until he can regain his journey with his monk. This is one of the most beautiful books of friendship and mentorship Ive read in a while.