Book review by George Simmers: This month at the Reading Group, we have looked at the novel reviews in Sheffield newspapers. I found the review of Kim in the Sheffield Independent in October 1901, and was intrigued by it. (a copy of the review is appended at the end of this post.) Kim is a book I admire greatly, but have not read it for several decades – so this was a good excuse to get re-acquainted with it.
There is nothing to argue with in the review’s first sentence:
Following the excellent rule in criticism of judging a writer by the excellent rule in criticism of judging a writer by what there is in his book, and not by what he has left out, we should plave ‘Kim’ high among the works of Mr Kipling.
But he goes on:
It may be that it is not a novel, and has no trace of a love story in it.
The critic goes on to say that in Kim:
Mr Kipling gives us something immeasurably better than a love story.
So I don’t want to be too hard on him, but where does he get this idea about a love-story being essential for a novel? Well, t seems to have been commonplace at the time. The critic of the Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer had ‘hoped that the work would prove to be a full-dress novel.’ but instead decides:
Kim rather belongs in the Captains Courageous class than that in which The Light that Failed would be placed [….] Kim remains a boy’s book, although one that men and women may read. [….] As for adults, many of them will protest that a story without a heroine cannot claim their suffrages, more especially when the two central figures are a young boy and a very old man.
The Leeds Mercury also classed it as a boys’ book, though with qualification:
The adventures are sufficiently exciting to satisfy even a morbid interest on such matters. For those, however, who do not read for excitement only, the charm of the story lies in its wonderful insight of Indian life.
It is interesting to see these conventional critics trying to make conventional sense of a book in which Kipling is rewriting the rules of fiction, and breaking down generic boundaries in as carefree a manner as his hero, Kim, breaks down social and racial boundaries. You probably know the basic premise of Kim. The son of an Irish soldier and his nursemaid wife, he is orphaned and brings himself up on he streets of Lahore. In the book’s first chapter, he befriends with a very old Buddhist priest whose life is a pilgrimage – but he is also recruited by the British secret service. The book is episodic and wide-ranging as it follows Kim’s progress towards maturity and understanding, as he travels through Northern India. What I remembered best from previous readings of the book was its depiction of the wonderfully varied life on the Great Trunk Road. The reviewer in the Western Daily Press put this rather well
To read this book is like looking on a biograph picture of Indian crowds.
By 1901 the cinema had not got much past the short films with a camera set up to take a shot of scene – very often of a crowd. Kipling was fascinated by this new technology, and would use this kind of cinematic crowd scene would play a crucial part in his 1904 short story ‘Mrs Bathurst’.
Re-reading, though, I also greatly enjoyed the depiction of Kim’s education in spycraft. On this reading I kept wondering about he book as a sort of fanciful re-telling of Kipling’s own life. He had spent his infancy as free spirit in India, before he was sent away to the misery of a foster-home in Southsea. The Kim of the first chapter seems a fantasy of what he might have been had he stayed. Kim is sent to St Xavier’s College for a conventional education, just as Kipling went to the United Services College. But for both of them the important education happens outside school For Kim it is an education in spycraft, for Kipling training as a journalist. Both of these involve accurate observation and reporting.
What none of the reviewers seemed to see, or preferred no to see, was that the book is a love story – of the love between Kim and the lama. It even has the classic pattern – boy meets lama, boy loses lama, boy regains lama. At the end each makes sacrifices and suffers for he other. The book can also be seen as Kipling’s love-letter to India. The book is full of India’s abundance, often expressed in lists:
Here is the lama’s feeling for the Indian landscape:
He blessed them in detail—the great glaciers, the naked rocks, the piled moraines and tumbled shale; dry upland, hidden salt-lake, age-old timber and fruitful water-shot valley one after the other, as a dying man blesses his folk; and Kim marvelled at his passion.
There are lists of people, and places and artefacts. Here is my very favorite list of the treasures found in the sanctum of Lurgan, the man of espionage and secrets:
The Lahore Museum was larger, but here were more wonders—ghost-daggers and prayer-wheels from Tibet; turquoise and raw amber necklaces; green jade bangles; curiously packed incense-sticks in jars crusted over with raw garnets; the devil-masks of overnight and a wall full of peacock-blue draperies; gilt figures of Buddha, and little portable lacquer altars; Russian samovars with turquoises on the lid; egg-shell china sets in quaint octagonal cane boxes; yellow ivory crucifixes—from Japan of all places in the world, so Lurgan Sahib said; carpets in dusty bales, smelling atrociously, pushed back behind torn and rotten screens of geometrical work; Persian water-jugs for the hands after meals; dull copper incense-burners neither Chinese nor Persian, with friezes of fantastic devils running round them; tarnished silver belts that knotted like raw hide; hairpins of jade, ivory, and plasma; arms of all sorts and kinds, and a thousand other oddments were cased, or piled, or merely thrown into the room, leaving a clear space only round the rickety deal table, where Lurgan Sahib worked.
It’s such descriptions that must have made the Sheffield critic praise the book in terms that would not usually be used in the same way today:
This romance of espionage is set the midst of Orientalism of the most fascinating character.
Since Edward Said published Orientalism in 1978, the word has not usually been used as a term of approbation. Orientalism is the European eye viewing the Eat with an othering gaze that affirms European primacy. Kim has been criticised as a glamorisation of the British Raj, and in his account of the novel in his Culture and Imperialism (1993) Edward Said can’t get over the fact that Kipling could not imagine a future India, independent of Britain. (Well, maybe few could, back in 1901,and even fewer twenty years before, when the novel is set.) Yet Said is too honest a critic not to admit his aesthetic admiration of the novel, and his account is fascinatingly divided. On the one hand he finds it politically wrong-headed and reprehensible; on the other he is able to see that Kipling’s imagination transcends the liinitation sof his political attitudes, and even his intentions. He insists that: ‘Kim most assuredly is not a political tract.’
Re-reading the novel, I was struck by how Kipling’s sympathy for the Indian is fas greater than his sympathy for the British. In that chapter on the Great Trunk Road, we are carried along by a sense of the good-fellowship, the liveliness and the generosity of the Indians who crowd there. Whereas, throughout the book, the depiction of the British is not glamorous. Kim, who has been a street Arab, living on his wits is forthright and clear-eyed about “the Sahibs, who ride about in two-wheeled carts and spend money with a spade.” The novel expresses huge respect for a few elite Englishmen – Creighton and Lurgan, and the keeper of the Lahore Museum, but the most common terms used about the English are ‘fools’ and ‘foolish’. The Army Chaplain Bennett, for example, who has the small-mindedness Kipling associates with evangelical religion, or the drummer-boy at Umballa to whom anyone non-white is an undifferentiated ‘Nigger’. This boy is the extreme case of the typical Sahib, who isn’t interested in the natives, doesn’t bother to learn their language or find out about their way of life. The Europeans Kipling admires are the ones who look at Indian culture with a fascinated anthropologist’s eye. As a young reporter Kipling had cast an eager objectifying eye on everything he saw in India; he went out at night exploring the city and its wickedness, and he was unpopular in the Club because his stories did not always flatter the white community.
Edward Said objects when Kipling says that Kim could ‘lie like an oriental’ – perhaps not realising that this is a compliment. We see Kim’s lying skills in action, and they are necessary for his own survival on the streets, and later for the sake of the Secret Service mission. I think that Said is taking the phrase ‘lie like an oriental’ in the conventional way that an Englishman like Bennett might have taken it. But Kipling knew the value of lies, and not just in a practical sense; in his autobiography ‘Something of Myself’ he describes how the bullying he endured when a fostered made him lie for self-preservation
[..]it made me give attention to the lies I soon found it necessary to tell: and this, I presume, is the foundation of literary effort.
Through lying, he discovered who he was.
Back to the Sheffield Independent. In the end, the critic there decides he isn’t worried about whether the book is a novel or not. He finishes:
No admirer of Mr Kipling can afford to miss this book.
That’s true.