05 June 2013

Kim by Rudyard Kipling

I have a book of knowledge that I have kept from my childhood.  It has a chapter on literature.  Five of its pages are devoted to illustrations of scenes from famous literary works: one for classical mythology, one for Dickens, two for everything from Shakespeare to Victorian times, and one for what it says are 'Books of Recent Times'.  

Among the illustrations on this page is one which shows a young boy walking through an Indian bazaar with a Tibetan lama.  The caption reads: 'Kim by Rudyard Kipling'.  By the time my book of knowledge was published, Kim had been in print for sixty years, which makes the usage of the word 'recent' very odd.  It is now over a hundred years since Kim hit the book stores, and I have been meaning to read it for a large slice of that time.

Kim is a picaresque novel in so much as its eponymous hero, a young orphan boy, is a lovable rogue.  We meet Kim when he is about thirteen and has been fending for himself on the streets of Lahore in the years since his father died.  Although he dresses as a native and has been tanned by the sun, Kim is actually of Irish descent.  Two things happen to him almost simultaneously: he enters the service of an itinerant Tibetan lama and becomes his chela (acolyte), and he is conscripted into the British Secret Service by a Pathan horse-trader and spy.  Kim's story, then, becomes divided by his desire to be with his beloved lama who is searching for the mythical River of the Arrow, and the part he plays in the political machinations of the empires of Britain and Russia, the so-called Great Game, as they vied for control of what is now Afghanistan.  Kim is also divided by his upbringing as a cat-witted urchin in Lahore, the imposed weight of his duty as the son of a white man, and his spiritual sojourn with the lama Teshoo.

On face value, Kim is a likeable story.  Its two central characters, Kim and the lama, are quite endearing, and they are surrounded by an ensemble of secondary characters who are exotic and intriguing.  The action takes place in a world that is also exotic and intriguing, and Kipling brings it all to life with a precise but vivid prose style.  All the senses are engaged as we explore Kim's slice of the sub-continent as it was in the 1880s.  

Or, better still, how Kipling would have us believe it to be.  One needs to be wary of the surreptitious (and not so surreptitious) anglophile sentiments expressed by the native Indian characters and the absence of countervailing voices.  And we could make note of the sweeping  statements (some positive, many jaundiced) made about the racial characteristics of the Easterners and the gender characteristics of women.  

I was greatly assisted in my reading of this text by the two extended and very informative introductions by Edward W. Said and Jan Montefiore that appear in the Penguin Classics eBook of Kim, which I both commend and recommend.  We are all prisoners of our times and of our personal and political temperaments, and Kipling is no exception.   Knowing this, and being forewarned, perhaps we can still enjoy Kim for what it is was essentially meant to be: an adventure story of a resourceful boy in a strange land in a strange time.  I know I did.

02 June 2013

Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne

When I was a child who had not long learned how to read, I found I had not patience for the books my cohort was supposed to be reading at that age because a) I thought they were simple and childish, and b) I preferred non-fiction - just the facts, m'am, just the facts. 

Then I discovered Jules Verne.  Journey to the Centre of the Earth, it was.  I'm sorry, but bears and piglets and magic puddings couldn't compete with Iceland and volcanoes and storms and dinosaurs, not to mention trusty chronometers.  I so wanted to be Professor Lidenbrock, with his amazing learning and resources.

One Verne novel led to another, and so it was that Around the World in Eighty Days was the second fiction book I read that I actually liked, all those years ago.  And this weekend, all these years later, I had a copy of the book and an afternoon and evening free in which to race down Memory Lane.

I reacquainted myself with the story of Phileas Fogg, a fastidious and punctual man of habit, who abruptly departs London because of a wager: twenty thousand pounds will he win if he can circumnavigate the globe in eighty days or less.  Fogg takes with him Passepartout (his newly hired man-servant) and a carpetbag stuffed with newly printed pound notes.  Everything goes well for master and man until they are intercepted in Port Said by a plain-clothes police detective called Fix who suspects Fogg of being a fugitive bank robber.  And that is when the true adventure begins.

I liked this book on second reading for what it is: a ripping yarn from bygone days.  It was much as I remembered it.  I also remembered the little boy who read this book.  Yes, I can still remember being as inflamed as Passepartout when we - he and I together  - discovered the plight of poor Aouda in the jungles of India.  On the other hand, while I remembered the leg of the journey across the United States of America, I had no recollection that both the writing and the sentiment of this part of the story were so bad.  In this respect, at least, both the reader and the times have changed, mercifully.

All in all, I spent an enjoyable evening with this short book: one that takes less time to read than to watch the 1956 film adaptation.  Well, almost less time.