This week I have been mostly 'reading' an audio book - Kim by Rudyard Kipling - and what an unexpected pleasure it has turned out to be. I toyed with audio books as companions to my daily walk to and from work last year - 70 minutes of to-ing and fro-ing with nothing but the drone of traffic for company seems like such a waste! - but I never seemed to get around to putting another book on my Ipod. Listening to Kim (which I downloaded for free ages ago courtesy of a Book Depository offer) has reminded me why I really must get myself together and join Audible. It's such a good way to read a Classic that I wouldn't otherwise try (not to mention that 'reading' for 70 minutes a day is an enormous luxury at the moment.) I had some vague impressions of the novel - set in colonial India at the tail-end of the 19th century, peopled with young English boys, concerned with some unlikely adventure, etc. A 'boy's own' type of story. I had shelved it away in my head as a book to read one day, perhaps, when I had read several thousand other, more pressing, things. I wasn't entirely wrong; just mostly. That is to say: Kim is set in India, and it does concern the unlikely adventures of a young boy, but it is much more interesting than I had thought.
[*Please forgive me if I spell names incorrectly. Having only heard them and not read them, and not having the text to hand, I'm having to work phonetically. I could have looked online but, well, I'm too lazy.]
The young orphaned protagonist, Kimball O'Hara, has grown up in the gutters of Lahore and, although Irish by birth, is as much a native of India as any of his street-rat friends. He is sharp and carefree, though illiterate and wild, living entirely off his wits; the only sign of his heritage is a leather roll of papers - his birth certificate; his father's army dismissal - which he wears around his neck like a charm. He occasionally runs errands for pennies, most particularly for the brusque Afghan horse dealer, Mahbub Ali, but otherwise is his own master. He follows his irrepressible curiosity where-ever it should lead him. In this case it prompts him to befriend a stranger to Lahore, a Tibetan lama on a quest to find a sacred river, and thereafter to embark south with him on the great trunk road. Before leaving he is entrusted with one last mission for Mahbub Ali - to deliver a letter with all haste to an Englishman in Umbala along the way. This, rather than the meeting with the lama, is the real beginning of Kim's adventure. Mahbub, the letter and the Englishman who receives it are all more than they seem as, it becomes clear, is Kim. Mahbub is a government spy, plying information up and down the trade routes, and has been using the unsuspecting Kim as his agent, with intention of bringing the boy into the 'Great Game' of the Secret Service before long.
Which is about as far as I have gotten at the moment. Two things strike me immediately:
1. That Kipling's narrative voice is both familiar and alien to me. On the one hand the novel is that friendly old beast, the late Victorian realist novel in English - gregarious, self-aware, pompous. On the other is the patina of sympathetic colonialism from an Anglo-Indian perspective. (I don't know much about Kipling, but I know he was born in India and identified thus all his life.) He clearly had a great affection for the country and its socio-cultural linguistic hub-bub - the secret service operates under the guise of the 'ethnographic survey' - and Kim is the personification of its glorious hybridity. It is this which is alienating. The language of British India, the assumptions Kipling makes about the reader's knowledge of the world of the novel, is a jolt. I have grown up with only the faintest echoes of Empire - school children barely touch the subject in history; too embarrassing by far - and to hear Kipling's narrative voice is to be reminded of a lost and almost forgotten identity. It is a window on a way of living and a way of seeing that has been washed away, and is both fascinating, discomforting and vaguely confusing all at once.
2. That Kim is strangely under-marketed. Given that its hero is the descendent and ancestor of a thousand and one boy heroes, full of sass and promise, and given Kipling's wry, self-deprecating prose-style, I'm surprised it isn't a) more studied by schools (it ticks all the boxes on identity, multi-culturalism, ethics, plus raises interesting questions about the history of race-relations and Empire), and b) pushed more by the Reading for Boys and Classics rebrands we've seen recently. I mused that it might be considered culturally insensitive (because Kipling's enlightened relativism only goes so far, as you might expect), but then remembered that Penguin recently re-marketed She by H. Rider-Haggard as part of its Red Classics with narry a qualm, which deals in far more explicit and offensive racial stereotypes. (Not to mention that it's incredibly sexist.) So why not Kim? Is Kipling so unfashionable these days? Too English? Too colonial? I suppose he may have a reputation for being stuffy on the one hand, and saccarhine on the other, but it seems to me that neither badge is earned.
More thoughts when I finish the book later this month.
~~Victoria~~