Kim: A Beggar? or the Youngest Spy in India? (Mass Market Paperback)

Kim is the story of two journies, certainly the holy man's as well as Kim's own, the reckoning with cultural identity and the east/west clash in a time of subterfuge and war. It is really a quite powerful story, dulled down at times by the author's seemingly ceaseless wonder, but for a tale marketed as being about a white European lost in the maze of turn-of-the-century India, there is a great deal that is very contemporary and an enormous amount of action and even betrayal.

Give it a go and read it to your kids. There are many valuable life lessons Kipling makes an attempt to teach and many wrong paths he explains to us all about taking.

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But of course reading without agendas nowadays would so offend our academies that it's absolutely impossible. KIM *is* a simple story, as one reviewer already mentioned, that does not really deal with colonial "assumptions" whatsoever. In fact, I marvel at how people ignore the basic fact that Kim resisted his Sahib identity when we could only sympathize with him. Kim contrasts well with THE JUNGLE BOOK'S Mowgli because he disdains most social groups, preferring above all his lama and "the road." If anything, his "yearning" toward colonization near the book's end (itself dubiously proven) probably reflects his educational indoctrination, if anything else. Kipling surely wasn't a stupid writer, and it's probably no coincidence that Kim turns to colonialism only after the Sahibs educate and recruit him in "the Great Game." Whether that's good or bad is irrelevant; Kipling does not justify, advocate or endorse colonialism in KIM. Nor does he waste space needlessly attacking it. Why do people need fiction to contain ideology? Why can't people understand that some stories are about characters and that authors imposing their voices is sometimes unnecessary? "Adult" perspectives in the novel, which critics charge could never come from Kim, come from adult characters. Duh. Kipling, unlike his postmodern butchers, did not write with an agenda.

Unfortunately for his reputation, Kipling professed elsewhere that he favored colonialism and the White Man's Burden. Readers, even more unfortunately, approach his books with such prejudices, prepared to pounce on his literature at the slightest provocation and blame him for not explicitly condemning British imperialism. I'm sorry that people hold such depressing views of how fiction should be written.

A note on the Penguin edition: I found its CONSTANT "scholastic" footnotes irritating and insulting. I can read a book without being told what Buddhism is, thanks. Then again, all those numbers detract from the story itself and advocate the editor's agenda that this book isn't to be enjoyed at all, but only to be jeered at in a postmodern armpit.

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