I’ll be honest here…I liked the book and loved Kipling’s descriptions of late 19th century India and the machinations occurring between competing powers (Russian and England) on the sub-continent. What I struggled with was the language. I won’t pretend to be a deep reader of older works in their original prose. Similar to my struggles with Shakespeare, the Bible (King James), Joyce, or Blake, there comes a certain point where reading the vernacular English of the times becomes more work that enjoyment for me. “Kim” straddles that line making it a less enjoyable work than I feel it could have been for me.
It is a classic work of English literature and has been reworked into many forms from comic books to films, to Reader’s Digest condensed versions. Its worthy of all those forms but its original version is the one to carry the feeling of actually BEING in India in this period. It truly lets you live amongst the people and conflicts of that time.
Kipling’s deep first hand knowledge of the India of which he speaks is apparent. His descriptions of the Grand Trunk Road, Indian cities, and different castes and characters (not “casts” though that too) are brilliant and have me pulling out a map to see how feasible it would be for me to walk the length of the Grand Trunk to experience the region as it is today in a modern pilgrimage from Bangladesh to Kabul. “And truly the Grand Trunk Road is a wonderful spectacle. It runs straight, bearing without crowding India's traffic for fifteen hundred miles—such a river of life as nowhere else exists in the world. They looked at the green-arched, shade-flecked length of it, the white breadth speckled with slow-pacing folk...”
And elsewhere Kim offers simple quotes that cut right to the heart of what I love about the world and living in it…things that I wish more people realized and were driven by “This is a brief life, but in its brevity it offers us some splendid moments, some meaningful adventures.”
It offers the reader adventure, action, meaning, and guidance—as the titular Kim grows from English street orphan to a small but important cog in the English wheel of the Great Game. It also serves in parallel, as a messenger of Buddhist thinking as one of the father figures presented to Kim (the llama he travels so often with) relays his thinking on the world and humanity’s place on the Wheel of Life. Not presented in a condescending or fanciful way, Kipling at first describes the llama as some sort of comic relief as an insane elder to Kim’s eyes but who becomes just as respected and knowledgeable about the purpose of one’s life as the English Colonel Creighton who serves as the other guiding force in his life. A wonderful balance is found within Kim and presented to the reader by Kipling…a mix of East and West that finds value in both sides of the coin.
If it sounds like I enjoyed the work, I did, greatly. I just wish my intellect could better parse the language of the written word from 150 years ago. I feel as if there was so much more here for me to uncover that I had glossed over in my ignorance. So be it for now but its a worthy work for anyone with a taste for history, interest in the wider world, political workings of great powers, and just wonderful tales of adventure.