‘Alas! It is a great and terrible world.’
(The lama’s catchphrase)
In part one of this review I summarised Rudyard Kipling’s 1901 novel, Kim, chapters 1 to 9, picking out interesting quotes, and commenting. This part picks up the summary half way through the novel i.e at chapter 10. It’s not just half way through, though. Chapter ten introduces four elements which change our view of the narrative.
1. For the first time the narrator refers to all the events of the story as not being in the exciting present, following the day-by-day, hour-by-hour exploits of our daring young hero, but in the historic past. Talking about a report Kim writes for his mentor Mahbub Ali, the narrator says:
The report in its unmistakable St Xavier’s running script, and the brown, yellow, and lake-daubed map, was on hand a few years ago (a careless clerk filed it with the rough notes of E’s second Seistan survey), but by now the pencil characters must be almost illegible. (p.144)
This completely changed my attitude to the story, converting it from a tale of the present to one of the past (regarded from Kipling’s time), and so doubly past: from our time back to the time of writing and publishing (1901) and then, further back, by a distance that allows secret reports to be openly published and its writing to fade i.e. an appreciable period.
2. The second thing is related to the first, which is that the narrative (not quite for the first time but for in the first really sustained way) steps back from describing the breathless present, to take a more lofty overview of events. Previously the narrator had reported virtually every scrap of dialogue between Kim and his interlocutors; now the narrator steps back and uses just a few paragraphs to convey the passage of no fewer than three years of Kim’s life, covering his school career at St Xavier’s College. In term time he learns white boy subjects like reading, writing and ‘rithmetic, along with Latin and cricket. In holiday time he accompanies Agent C25, otherwise known as Mahbub Ali, well-known Pathan horse trader, on his ‘business’ trips to various parts of India, all the time learning spycraft on the job. Or he goes to stay with the supposed jeweller Lurgan Sahib up in Simla, where he is instructed in the arts of disguise and blending in.
In other words, after this brief overview of the passage of time, events from chapter ten onwards occur three years later than the events of the first half. We are told that Kim is now 16 years old (p.149).
3. Part of this change involves a switch from direct speech – the overwhelming majority of the text to date has been direct speech i.e. dialogue – to narrative description. It’s like stepping off a fast-moving tram onto the pavement. Suddenly the text has a completely different feel.
4. Lastly, it’s also at the start of chapter 10 that Mahbub gives Kim a gun. A gun.
A mother-of-pearl, nickel-plated, self-extracting .450 revolver.
Suddenly, at a stroke, a story which had been about a 10 or 11 year old boy having innocent adventures turns into a spy story with guns. Guns and knives had, albeit obliquely, occurred earlier, specifically in the scene where Kim warns Ali that two enemy agents are lying in wait to shoot him outside he and his employees’ campment at Lucknow railway station (chapter 8). But with Ali’s ceremonial presentation to Kim of his own gun, suddenly the story seems to have more in common with Raymond Chandler than the innocent schoolboy adventures of Stevenson or Rider Haggard.
Plot summary from chapter 10
Chapter 10
Head of ‘the Department’ Colonel Creighton and two of his best native operatives, Ali and Lurgan, have a summit conference about Kim’s future. The latter pair think Creighton should have been using Kim on missions years ago. For the first (and only) time the phrase ‘Secret Service’ is used. The phrase ‘Great Game’ had cropped up only twice before in the text (‘the Great Game that never ceases day and night, throughout India’); from now on it occurs 15 times.
In Lucknow, Ali takes Kim to visit Huneefa the blind hoori who uses her stain to colour the now-pale Kim back to a native brown. Turns out she is also a witch or enchantress and, as Kim passes out due to heavy soporifics, she casts spells to keep traditional devils away from him. Also turns out that the obese Babu is out on the balcony observing proceedings (with repugnance). He and Ali are both a bit freaked out by the genuine witch intensity Huneefa.
So Colonel Creighton has agreed that Kim can finally definitively leave St Xavier’s. Ali supervises him being painted brown and then clothed in native dress. The plan is to let him wander the roads with his lama for another 6 months as a probationary period.
Chapter 11
So Kim is told he may travel to Tirthankars’ Temple, Benares for a happy reunion with his master, so he catches a train, with the usual casual encounters with other travellers which make the book feel so rich and full.
When he arrives at the Jain temple, the lama is predictably unemotional, shows Kim his cell, explains his devotions, explaining that he has wandered here and yon but many dreams have told him that he would never find the River of Life until he was reunited with his chela. And so he has patiently waited three years for their reunion.
He treats the fevered child of a desperate father, a Jat from Jullundur, with quinine and beef essence, curing him, but with delicacy and grace awards the credit to the god of the Jains, the lama’s hosts, who are flattered. Kipling repeatedly describes the delicacy and respect of the various native traditions, and generally contrasts them with white people’s blundering clumsiness e.g. Bennett the chaplain.
When Kim rises to ‘bless’ the child we discover that he is now, aged 16, ‘tall and slim’, like all male heroes should be (p.164)
The lama decides they will head north, so Kim arranges a train ticket. The Bankoh with the sick son accompanies them. On the train they meet ‘a mean, lean little person – a Mahratta’, who uses the special rhythm of speech and displays his amulet, to let Kim know he is one of the Secret Service, agent E23. He tells a real espionage story of travelling South with a colleague to collect vital information, they are set upon and his colleague killed, he just has time to bury the vital document ‘under the Queen’s Stone, at Chitor’, then he is chased all over central India by enemy agents, one of whom finally attacks and cuts him, before he makes his getaway onto the current train, cut and bleeding and shaking in terror.
Kim puts all his skills of disguise and uses the paintbox Lurgan gave him, to utterly transform E23.
In place of the tremulous, shrinking trader there lolled against the corner an all but naked, ash-smeared, ochre-barred, dusty-haired Saddhu, his swollen eyes –opium takes quick effect on an empty stomach –luminous with insolence and bestial lust, his legs crossed under him, Kim’s brown rosary round his neck, and a scant yard of worn, flowered chintz on his shoulders. (p.171)
Chapter 12
They arrive at Delhi station where a young British officer is leading a group of native policemen in a search for E23. The thing is, the opposition agents have framed him for a murder down South and his picture and description have been widely circulated, to police and officialdom outside ‘the Department’. That’s why Kim performed his makeup magic on the train.
Now the English officer, searching through the train, comes to their compartment, sees a half-naked Saddhu (E23 in disguise), a lama meditating, his chela yakking, and a big hairy peasant (the man with the sick infant) and – with what this book has to taught us to be characteristic English ignorance – dismisses them:
‘Nothing here but a parcel of holy-bolies,’ said the Englishman aloud, and passed on.’
In the immense crowd of Delhi station, E23 sees a tall British officer and contrives to blunder into him, let fly a stream of abuse at which the officer arrests him. E23 just has time to explain that this is Strickland, ‘one of us’, an authority figure who appears in other Kipling stories.
The narrator intervenes to indicate the web of connections which makes up the Great Game. Soon a telegram is going from Strickland’s office in Delhi to agents in Chitor who dig up the letter, and the information, he tells us, has consequences which ripple as far afield as the Ottoman Sultan.
Meanwhile, Kim and the lama set off on foot heading north from Delhi with the foothills of the Himalayas in the background, in scenes of village life beautifully illustrated by Kipling. They are in the neighbourhood of the matron of Hulu who sends servants to invite them to her house. Here there are comic scenes as this domineering woman bosses her household and the lama, while Kim giggles at his discomfort. I realised she’s a bit like Tintin’s Madame Castafiore, imperious, bossy but loveable.
One evening she introduces them to a worker of charms who has healed her sick grandson, before departing grandly in a servant-held palanquin to tour her villagers. At which point the medicine man reveals he is none other than the obese Hurree Babu.
Three things. Babu first of all reveals that it was he who was sent down to Chitor to retrieve the buried document. He tells Kim how impressed everyone in ‘the Department’ was by his quick thinking on the train, in disguising and thus saving E23.
Then he tells him a new situation. Three years earlier the British Army, including the Mavericks, had marched off to fight, in what I take to have been the Second Afghan War (1878 to 1880). At the peace some of the northern princedoms had undertaken to have roads built. Hurree supervised the building but slowly learned that the princes, and the local coolies, all thought of the roads as being prepared for invading Russians. Now, Hurree tells him, two spies have been sent by Russia, one a Russian and one a Frenchman, under cover of a hunting expedition, to spy out the lie of the land, to make maps of the area, to prepare the way, maybe, for an invading army.
Babu says he would simply poison them and be done but the British government with its ludicrous sense of fair play is allowing them to visit and keep up the front of mere hunters. But:
‘They are Russians, and highly unscrupulous people.’
Nothing changes, then. So Hurree asks Kim to head north with him to deal with these Russkies, but not travelling together. Hurree will go ahead and asks Kim to persuade the lama to head northwards, but at a day’s march behind them, so nobody thinks they’re connected. Which is what they do.
Chapter 13
Lovely descriptions of walking up into the foothills of the Himalayas, the villages, the wildlife, the clean air, the bracingly steep slopes. The lama grows stronger as he scents the mountain air of his Tibetan homeland.
Hurree Babu overtakes them and they discuss plans. He tells them to follow his umbrella, which he will keep open at all times, then hurries past them. A few days later he catches up with the two foreign spies up in the mountains. They had bullied the 11 coolies lent them by an independent Rajah one time too many, after a particularly scary thunderstorm, and the servants had melted into the forest. At this propitious moment the Babu appeared and posed as the ‘agent for His Royal Highness, the Rajah of Rampur.’ The Russian and Frenchman are delighted.
He lets them get him drunk and complains more and more about the perfidious British i.e. lulling them into thinking he can be suborned to their cause.
For the first time we see and hear the two foreign spies. Why is one Russian, one French? Because, according to the notes, the Paranoid party in the British administration saw a threat not only from Russia via the North-West Frontier, but (far more remotely) from France, which was annexing parts of China and, it was feared, might attempt an attack on India through Tibet.
The choice of nationalities is made, then, for Kipling’s propaganda purposes. Their characters and conversation are equally propagandistic. They are made to systematically under-estimate the British, taking their (the British) apparent openness to strange travellers as weakness; and to over-estimate their (the Russian and French) understanding of ‘the Oriental mind’. Says the Russian:
‘It is we who can deal with Orientals.’
This kind of hubris, of unjustified vaunting, doesn’t go unpunished in Kipling. wo days later, they come across the lama sitting with the diagram explaining his religion, expounding it to Kim. The foreigners ask who they are. Babu explains this is a famous local holy man, and he will expound the mysteries of Buddhism. The lama is delighted to do so, while Babu takes Kim aside and tells him the foreigners have all their reports – books and reports and maps – stored in a large kilta with the reddish top.
Suddenly – violence! The Russian wants the lama’s diagram, offers money, the lama inevitably refuses, the Russian seizes it and it tears. The lama goes for his metal pencase, the Russian punches him full in the face. All the coolies recoil in superstitious horror. While the lama reels back from the blow, Kim throws himself at the Russian’s throat, rolling down the hill a little, till he can bash the Russian’s head against a boulder. The Frenchman ran towards the lama, fumbling with his revolver as if to take him hostage, but is driven off by a barrage of stones from the coolies, who scoop up the wounded lama and all disappear into the forest, as dusk falls suddenly.
The Babu runs down to Kim, tells him to lay off the Russian, tells him to run and join the coolies in the forest, where they have taken the foreigners’ bags, get possession of the bag of maps. Kim stops bashing, turns and runs. The Frenchman fires and just misses him. For the first time Kim takes out his gun and fires it in anger, missing the Frenchman, then running on into the trees.
Now the Babu takes charge, begging the Frenchman to stop shooting, assisting the injured Russian to his feet.
Cut to the coolies in the fir trees. They are outraged by the act of sacrilege they’ve just seen; one of them points out they have the foreigners’ four rifles and could simply go down and shoot them dead. But the lama, after a moment’s hesitation, rises above the situation and his own injuries and preaches true Buddhist forbearance. No. NO, he commands the coolies who quickly back down. The foreigners’ anger and impiety will bring its own reward. They will be reincarnated as worms. Kim cheerfully chips in that he kicked the Russian in the groin as they tumbled down the hillside together.
No, the coolies will take the lama and Kim back to their village, Shamlegh-under-the-Snow. Kim realises that, despite his brave front, the lama is more badly shaken than he admits. His heart is racing. He feels dizzy. The coolies then discuss how they are going to divide the spoils because they have carried off the foreigners’ entire baggage. Here Kim is canny and doesn’t so much claim the big kilta, the basket containing eight month’s work by the foreigner’s, maps and notes etc, as plants the idea that it is full of bad juju and only he knows how to defuse and turn it away.
Cut to Hurree, a mile away, on the main track with the furious foreigners, alternately shouting at each other or berating him. So he play-acts the stupid native, submits to abuse and blows, the better to stick with them. And hugs himself with glee for he knows how he will guide the losers through scores of mountain villages where they will become a byword for humiliation and ineptitude.
Chapter 14
Arriving at their village the coolies divide their loot. The lama regrets giving way to anger and meditates all night. Next morning Kim meets the Woman of Shamlegh, bold and commanding. The men have gone and left her with the kilta. In her hut Kim spills it on the floor and discovers all the foreign spies’ equipment:
Survey-instruments, books, diaries, letters, maps, and queerly scented native correspondence. At the very bottom was an embroidered bag covering a sealed, gilded, and illuminated document such as one King sends to another.
The woman of Shamlegh flirts with Kim. He is now a tall handsome young man (of 16). She appears to offer Kim her ‘hand’ and headship of the village. Kim has to tactfully decline (p.214) and again on page 218. She is really smitten by his handsomeness. Love interest very unusual in Kipling.
He asks her to take a message to the Babu. Village children are monitoring their process along the forest road. Later she returns with a reply from the Babu that all is well, that Kim and the lama should retrace their steps, and he will overtake them, once he has escorted the foreigners as far as Simla.
The lama comes to sit with the other villagers, dangling their feet over the vertiginous edges of the mountain village, laughing and smoking. He confesses to Kim that he is very sad. It was a mistake to abandon his quest for the River of the Arrow and return to the hills. He comes of the hills and loves the hills but that is precisely why it was giving in to his desires and affections to return up here. And the blow he received was a sign from the Wheel that he was slipping back into the world of emotions. No, they must return down to the plains.
The woman of Shamlegh now reveals that she had an affair with a Sahib who fell sick, who took her to the nearest mission station, taught her the piano, taught her Christianity, left promising to come back but never did. Bitter, she returned to lord it over this shabby little village and its poor menfolk. She was beguiled by Kim because he reminded her of her Sahib, but Kim persists in saying he must return to the plains with his lama till she becomes angry and bitter. She mocks the lama’s weakness, he can barely support himself against the doorpost, and so whistles up some of her men who bring out a dooli, ‘the rude native litter of the Hills’, and carefully lift the ailing lama into it.
She and Kim squabble up to the departure but then he surprises her by dropping his disguise of assistant priest to a lama, taking her round the waist and kissing her, Sahib style, while saying ‘Good-bye, my dear.’ As the litter is carried down the hill by the grunting village men, Kim looks back and sees her, a small figure waving from the door of her hut.
Chapter 15
The final chapter, tying up loose ends. We are told how Hurree Babu continued his pose of obseqious guide till he had led the foreigners all the way to Simla, where he grovellingly begged a testimonial then disappeared. Reappeared in Shamlegh where the Woman told him about Kim and the lama’s departure in the litter, and he sets off to overtake them, having lost quite a lot of weight in all these peregrinations.
Now the lama is becoming ill. When the littermen leave them at the plain Kim becomes his staff, leaned on, carrying the foodbag, the bag with the foreigners’ secrets, begging in the morning, setting up the lama’s blanket, caring for the old man who is visibly dying.
The lama is full of gratitude. Kim says he loves him and has failed him and hasn’t done enough and bursts into tears. The lama raises him up and says he is the best of disciples.
Kim had sent message ahead to the widow of Kulu, the chatterbox who hosted them before. Now she sends a litter to collect the holy man and falls into long middle-aged flirtation which the lama takes in good part. Kim is so tired he’s ill. The widow vows to nurse him back to health.
She gives him a lockable strongbox for the treasures, brews him reviving potions and force them down him, then she and another old woman give him a truly Indian massage, after which Kim sleeps for 36 hours.
When he wakes, refreshed, it’s to discover the Babu has caught up with them and the lady of Kulu, the Sahiba, has been feeding him up, too. He has appeared in his long-running disguise as a ‘humble Dacca quack.’. Now Kim formally hands over the foreigners’ treasure trove to the Babu and it is a great weight off his mind. The responsibility has been stressing him.
We learn that it is clear proof of the treason of some of the northern princes, sucking up to the Tsar, so the British will replace them. And the Babu tells how he delivered them to Simla where they tried to establish their identity at the nearest bank, having made Russia a laughing stock among peasants along the entire route.
(It’s a slight puzzle in the plot that nothing further seems to happen to the two foreign spies. They are allowed to continue on their way.)
The Babu, in his comic way, announces that Mahbub Ali has come to the house too. He has to go now, to make report, but soon they will all rendezvous up at Lurgan Sahib’s in Simla, tell all their stories and have a party. This is all very convivial and happy.
Very interestingly, Kim is portrayed as being so shattered that he feels quite alienated from the world, almost as if he’s had a nervous breakdown. Nothing will focus, nothing makes sense. Then. Click. It all slots into place.
He looked upon the trees and the broad fields, with the thatched huts hidden among crops – looked with strange eyes unable to take up the size and proportion and use of things – stared for a still half-hour. All that while he felt, though he could not put it into words, that his soul was out of gear with its surroundings – a cog-wheel unconnected with any machinery, just like the idle cog-wheel of a cheap Beheea sugar-crusher laid by in a corner. The breezes fanned over him, the parrots shrieked at him, the noises of the populated house behind – squabbles, orders, and reproofs – hit on dead ears.
‘I am Kim. I am Kim. And what is Kim?’ His soul repeated it again and again.
He did not want to cry – had never felt less like crying in his life – but of a sudden easy, stupid tears trickled down his nose, and with an almost audible click he felt the wheels of his being lock up anew on the world without. Things that rode meaningless on the eyeball an instant before slid into proper proportion. Roads were meant to be walked upon, houses to be lived in, cattle to be driven, fields to be tilled, and men and women to be talked to. They were all real and true.
It’s a rare bit of psychology, for Kipling. Kim goes outside for the first time in days and lies on the good earth and feels it healing him.
Cut to Mahbub and the lama returning from a walk. Turns out the lama stumbled into a nearby book a few days earlier, and Mahbub leapt in and stopped him from drowning. But the lama insists that this little brook was the River of the Arrow and that he has finally achieved enlightenment. Mahbub mocks, and makes sarcastic asides in his own language, but is impressed by the lama’s utter certainty. He even sees the funny side when the lama asks him to take up Buddhism and follow The Way.
Mahbub the Muslim Pathan stomps off about his business. The lama calmly sits down beside sleeping Kim and wakes him. He sits:
cross-legged figure, outlined jet-black against the lemon-coloured drift of light. So does the stone Bodhisat sit who looks down upon the patent self-registering turnstiles of the Lahore Museum. (p.239)
Neatly tying the scene back to the very opening outside the Lahore Museum. The lama proceeds to tell Kim in all seriousness how, while he (Kim) was recovering, he (the lama) went and sat under a tree, taking no food or water for two days and two nights. And then:
‘Upon the second night – so great was my reward – the wise Soul loosed itself from the silly Body and went free. This I have never before attained, though I have stood on the threshold of it. Consider, for it is a marvel!’
Freedom from the silly body and its illusions and devilries. Enlightenment. Kipling indulges in a powerfully persuasive vision of the lama’s soul flying completely free of his body, free of the constraints of time and place, and uniting with the Great Soul where everything is always now.
But he felt compelled to return to the body of this poor mortal, Teshoo Lama, in order to show his disciple the way. And the last spoken words of the story are his imprecation to Kim to follow him on the road to salvation:
‘Son of my Soul, I have wrenched my Soul back from the Threshold of Freedom to free thee from all sin – as I am free, and sinless! Just is the Wheel! Certain is our deliverance! Come!’
This is a very moving and persuasive end to this long rambling tale. It deliberately leaves completely up in the air the question whether Kim will follow the way and become a seeker for wisdom, or will at some point be reunited with Babu, Mahbub and Lurgan and graduate into a fully-fledged operative in the Great Game.
My money would be the mystical route, for right at the end he is hugely relieved to be shot of the box of foreigners’ correspondence and says the Great Game can go hang. Whereas his reverence for the lama is deep and unashamed.
But the point is Kipling leaves it as a sort of cliff-hanger. A Rorschach test. What you think happens next says more about you than about the story.
Scenes and descriptions
Odd and clotted though Kipling’s prose often is, he strews the book with beautiful word paintings.
In the Jain temple
Kim watched the last dusty sunshine fade out of the court, and played with his ghost-dagger and rosary. The clamour of Benares, oldest of all earth’s cities awake before the Gods, day and night, beat round the walls as the sea’s roar round a breakwater. Now and again, a Jain priest crossed the court, with some small offering to the images, and swept the path about him lest by chance he should take the life of a living thing. A lamp twinkled, and there followed the sound of a prayer. Kim watched the stars as they rose one after another in the still, sticky dark, till he fell asleep at the foot of the altar.
Climbing the foothills
They crossed a snowy pass in cold moonlight, when the lama, mildly chaffing Kim, went through up to his knees, like a Bactrian camel – the snow-bred, shag-haired sort that came into the Kashmir Serai. They dipped across beds of light snow and snow-powdered shale, where they took refuge from a gale in a camp of Tibetans hurrying down tiny sheep, each laden with a bag of borax. They came out upon grassy shoulders still snow-speckled, and through forest, to grass anew.
The shikarris who save Kim and the lama
They sat down a little apart from the lama, and, after listening awhile, passed round a water-pipe whose receiver was an old Day and Martin blacking-bottle. The glow of the red charcoal as it went from hand to hand lit up the narrow, blinking eyes, the high Chinese cheek-bones, and the bull-throats that melted away into the dark duffle folds round the shoulders. They looked like kobolds from some magic mine – gnomes of the hills in conclave. And while they talked, the voices of the snow-waters round them diminished one by one as the night-frost choked and clogged the runnels.
There’s story, there’s a plot of sorts, there’s characters. But you could argue that Kim is worth reading, and treasuring, for these descriptions alone.
Secondary characters
Quite apart from the main, recurring characters, Kim has a large cast of walk-on parts, especially when Kim is on the road or on a train with his lama.
- Huneefa, the blind witch or mistress of dawat
- A long-haired Hindu bairagi (holy man), who had just bought a ticket, halted before him at that moment and stared intently (p.156)
- a chance-met Punjabi farmer—a Kafmboh from Jullundur-way who had appealed in vain to every God of his homestead to cure his small son (p.157)
- A white-clad Oswal banker from Ajmir, his sins of usury new wiped out (p.158)
- a mean, lean little person—a Mahratta, so far as Kim could judge by the cock of the tight turban (p.167)
- A hot and perspiring young Englishman (p.173)
- A tallish, sallowish District Superintendent of Police – belt, helmet, polished spurs and all – strutting and twirling his dark moustache (p.174); this turns out to be Inspector Strickland, an authority figure who appears in other Kipling stories
- the Russian spy
- the French spy
- the man from Ao-chung who emerges as the leader of the rebellious coolies
- the Woman of Shamlegh
Kim’s identity crises
Modern literary and art criticism is obsessed the idea of identity and the umpteen different crises it is prey to – gender identity, sexual identity, national identity, ethnic identity, religious identity. Kipling was there 120 years earlier with this story of a boy with an excess of identities: is he the orphan of a British soldier? Or a canny street kid from Lahore? Or a budding young spy for the Raj?
[Ali] ‘Therefore, in one situate as thou art, it particularly behoves thee to remember this with both kinds of faces. Among Sahibs, never forgetting thou art a Sahib; among the folk of Hind, always remembering thou art – He paused, with a puzzled smile.
[Kim] ‘What am I? Mussalman, Hindu, Jain, or Buddhist? That is a hard knot.’
And:
[Kim] ‘Hai mai! I go from one place to another as it might be a kickball. It is my Kismet. No man can escape his Kismet. But I am to pray to Bibi Miriam, and I am a Sahib.’ He looked at his boots ruefully. ‘No; I am Kim. This is the great world, and I am only Kim. Who is Kim?’ He considered his own identity, a thing he had never done before, till his head swam. He was one insignificant person in all this roaring whirl of India, going southward to he knew not what fate. (p.101)
Who is Kim, indeed?
A very few white people, but many Asiatics, can throw themselves into a mazement as it were by repeating their own names over and over again to themselves, letting the mind go free upon speculation as to what is called personal identity. When one grows older, the power, usually, departs, but while it lasts it may descend upon a man at any moment.
‘Who is Kim – Kim –Kim?’
He squatted in a corner of the clanging waiting-room, rapt from all other thoughts; hands folded in lap, and pupils contracted to pin-points. In a minute – in another half-second – he felt he would arrive at the solution of the tremendous puzzle; but here, as always happens, his mind dropped away from those heights with a rush of a wounded bird, and passing his hand before his eyes, he shook his head.
When the Russian punches the lama, Kim retaliates like a hot-blooded Irishman (his father was Irish and his Irish ‘blood’ is made much of throughout the text). Then he kneels over the lama, cradling his head and speaking like a native.
Then he remembered that he was a white man, with a white man’s camp-fittings at his service.
Lachrymose literary critics, keen to make everything a crisis, lament Kim’s ‘split’ identity and are all-too-quick to make it a symbol of India itself, with some tragic divide between coloniser and colonised. But there are two other, less hysterical ways to think about the issue.
One is the obvious one that is front and centre of the story itself, which is that the depth of the white boy’s knowledge of Indian street life makes him wonderful choice of operative for Creighton and the Department: an entirely positive, good thing.
The other is even simpler, which is that it’s fun and it’s cool. It’s cool being Kim, king of the streets in Lahore, skilled manipulator of railway carriages, of resting places on the Great Trunk Road, teller of tales to big households. Street urchin, loyal disciple, schoolboy, trainee spy. Dressing up and having adventures is what Sherlock Holmes and loads of other protagonists of 1890s adventure stories love to do, and which boys of all ages who read them, wish they could do.
Kipling’s crabbed prose and plotless stories
As discussed in the first of these two Kim reviews, Kipling’s prose is crabbed, abbreviated, littered with Biblical or official or archaic vocabulary, allusive, telegraphic. He uses almost any device in order to prevent it being smooth and flowing and easily comprehensible. It’s the textual embodiment of his barely fierceness, his energy, his sarcasm, his facetiousness. Some sentences just require a double take.
Lurgan Sahib did not use as direct speech, but his advice tallied with Mahbub’s
Meaning that Lurgan didn’t say it so directly as Mahbub did. Odd locution, though, isn’t it? Examples abound. Here’s the start of chapter 11. After being handed his disguise, a small gun, and news from Ali that he’s allowed to go see his lama, Ali then leaves him alone at Lucknow train station, and:
Followed a sudden natural reaction.
Think of all the ways you’d rewrite that to make it smoother, more readable, more enjoyable. No, Kipling prefers the clipped, telegraphese.
The man who couldn’t write plots
I’d like to link this tendency with another major tendency of Kipling’s fiction, which is his struggle to come up with plots, with actual storylines. Many of his short stories do, indeed, have plots, but it’s also quite common to come across ones which are more like anecdotes which have been stretched, or sometimes just like clever ideas which have been padded out. I’m thinking of the ‘story’ of a new-built ship where he gives all the parts voices and shows how they learn to work together. Or the one about the animal inhabitants of an old mill who react to it being hooked up to electric power by its owner. These are good ideas but they don’t quite build up to be actual stories. Ditto, for example, the Just So stories. It’s a brilliant idea, but quite a few of the actual stories don’t quite live up to the original conception.
The Norton edition contains excerpts from letters and relevant writers. In particular it has several short excerpts from the autobiography Kipling wrote right at the end of his life, ‘Something of Myself’. And in these it’s interesting to read not once but twice, he himself conceding that thinking out plots was his chief shortcoming as a writer. He describes the way he chewed over a revised version of Kim with his father, chatting over their time in India over many a pipe of tobacco. It was in this process that many of the very specific details with bejewel the final narrative, its ‘opulence of detail’, were remembered and added. At which point he goes on to write:
As to its form there was but one possibility to the author, who said that what was good enough for Cervantes was good enough for him. To whom the Mother: ‘Don’t you stand in your wool-boots hiding behind Cervantes with me! You know you couldn’t make a plot to save your soul.’ (p.275)
Several things. One, it displays Kipling’s enduring bond with his parents. He was clearly very attached to his mother and father till the end of his life, and this is sweet. Two, this is a typically contorted way of making his point, hiding it behind dialogue with his mother. Three, and this may be because he’s embarrassed to admit such a cardinal failing in a writer, that he had great ideas, brilliant ideas, but struggled to work them up into plots and narratives.
You turn the page and there’s another excerpt from Something of Myself which really rams it home.
Kim, of course, was nakedly picaresque and plotless – a thing imposed from without. (p.277)
Not just this, he then goes on to write a colourful paragraph describing how he ‘dreamed for many years’ of turning the story into a good, solid, three-volume Victorian novel, with a compelling storyline, psychologically rich characters, carefully worked out symbolism etc etc. But he couldn’t. He just couldn’t.
Not being able to do this, I dismissed the ambition as ‘beneath the thinking mind’. So does a half-blind man dismiss shooting and golf.
I think he’s being hard on himself. Tens of thousands of novels are coming-of-age stories which hang a sequence of sometimes pretty random incidents on the notion that they all occurred to the central protagonist and marked his or her ‘development’ and growth from childhood, through adolescence into adulthood. Kim is no more random than many of these. In fact I think he does a good job of establishing the main characters – the lama at the start, Mahbub Ali growing in importance, Lurgan Sahib appearing half way through to add colour and variety, then Hurree Babu adding strangeness.
But clearly Kipling himself saw the novel as deficient in plot, and plot-planning as a major weakness in his abilities as a writer.
Is Kipling’s crabbed style a compensation for lack of plot?
My suggestion is that, after reading lots of Kipling, I began to wonder whether his odd, crabbed, cryptic, archaicising, Biblicising prose style was what he twisted up and contorted and worked on instead of plots. He knew he couldn’t make an impact with dramatic stories – so he developed, or jazzed up his already eccentric way of writing, instead.
I imagined him getting more and more frustrated with himself and, in his stress and anxiety, strangulating the English language into ever weirder shapes and locutions, as if the baroque overwroughtness of his prose would somehow compensate for what he himself was very conscious was an embarrassing absence of fully worked-out story.
Credit
Kim was serialised in Cassell’s Magazine from January to November 1901, and first published in book form by Macmillan & Co. Ltd in October 1901. All references are to the 2002 Norton Critical Edition edited by Zohreh T. Sullivan.
Books & Boots 