Kim
by Rudyard Kipling
Summary
Kimball O'Hara, orphaned and left to fend for himself in the streets of Lahore, has grown up passing easily as a native boy despite being the son of an Irish soldier, and the novel opens with him falling in with an elderly Tibetan lama searching for a legendary river said to wash away sin. Kim attaches himself to the lama as his disciple, and the two set out together along the Grand Trunk Road, a journey Kipling fills with an enormous, closely observed cast of merchants, holy men, soldiers and travelers that gives the book as much the texture of a portrait of India as of a plot. Along the way Kim is identified as a British soldier's son through a document he carries, and while the lama arranges to pay for his formal education at a British school in Lucknow, Kim spends his holidays being trained, almost as a game at first, in the tradecraft of British intelligence, memory drills, disguise, the reading of small details that give a stranger away. By his late teens Kim has become a working agent in the real Great Game between Britain and Russia over control of Central Asia, and the novel's climax sends him and the lama into the Himalayas, where Kim recovers a set of enemy documents during a tense confrontation with Russian and French agents. The lama, exhausted and near collapse from the journey, finally experiences the spiritual breakthrough he has been seeking for the entire book and tells Kim he has found his river at last, ending the novel on the lama's fulfillment rather than on any final word about which service, spy or disciple, Kim will ultimately choose.
Kipling writes India with a density of sound, smell and incident no English novel had managed before, and the book suits a reader willing to move slowly through its crowded scenes rather than race toward plot; its real pleasure is the sheer variety of the world it stages page by page.
Historical Context & Significance
Rudyard Kipling published Kim in October 1901, and the Swedish Academy awarded him the 1907 Nobel Prize in Literature six years later, citing the power of observation, originality of imagination and remarkable talent for narration running through his work. At forty one he became the youngest writer ever to win the literature prize and the first laureate to write in English.
Kim is still widely read as his most fully achieved novel, though Kipling's reputation as a whole later suffered badly over his open support for British imperial rule, a politics that sits uneasily against a book so evidently in love with the India it describes. Modern critics tend to read Kim as a genuinely divided achievement, alive to India's texture and people even while it takes British control of the country entirely for granted.