Kim - Hardcover

Kipling, Rudyard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0891902716 ISBN 13: 9780891902713

Publisher: Amereon Limited, 1998

Synopsis

Kim is an orphan, living from hand to mouth in the teeming streets of Lahore. One day he meets a man quite unlike anything in his wide experience, a Tibetan lama on a quest. Kim's life suddenly acquires meaning and purpose as he becomes the lama's guide and protector--his chela. Other forces are at work as Kim is sucked into the intrigue of the Great Game and travels the Grand Trunk Road with his lama.

How Kim and the lama meet their respective destinies on the road and in the mountains of India forms one of the most compelling adventure tales of all time.

About this title

Review

One of the particular pleasures of reading Kim is the full range of emotion, knowledge, and experience that Rudyard Kipling gives his complex hero. Kim O'Hara, the orphaned son of an Irish soldier stationed in India, is neither innocent nor victimized. Raised by an opium-addicted half-caste woman since his equally dissolute father's death, the boy has grown up in the streets of Lahore:

Though he was burned black as any native; though he spoke the vernacular by preference, and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song; though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with the small boys of the bazar; Kim was white--a poor white of the very poorest.

From his father and the woman who raised him, Kim has come to believe that a great destiny awaits him. The details, however, are a bit fuzzy, consisting as they do of the woman's addled prophecies of "'a great Red Bull on a green field, and the Colonel riding on his tall horse, yes, and'--dropping into English--'nine hundred devils.'"

In the meantime, Kim amuses himself with intrigues, executing "commissions by night on the crowded housetops for sleek and shiny young men of fashion." His peculiar heritage as a white child gone native, combined with his "love of the game for its own sake," makes him uniquely suited for a bigger game. And when, at last, the long-awaited colonel comes along, Kim is recruited as a spy in Britain's struggle to maintain its colonial grip on India. Kipling was, first and foremost, a man of his time; born and raised in India in the 19th century, he was a fervid supporter of the Raj. Nevertheless, his portrait of India and its people is remarkably sympathetic. Yes, there is the stereotypical Westernized Indian Babu Huree Chander with his atrocious English, but there is also Kim's friend and mentor, the Afghani horse trader Mahub Ali, and the gentle Tibetan lama with whom Kim travels along the Grand Trunk Road. The humanity of his characters consistently belies Kipling's private prejudices, and raises Kim above the mere ripping good yarn to the level of a timeless classic. --Alix Wilber

From the Back Cover

Kim

 

A Longman Cultural Edition

 

Editors: Paula M. Krebs and Tricia Looten

 

Series Editor:  Susan Wolfson

 

Affordably priced, Longman Cultural Editions present classic works in provocative and illuminating contexts–cultural, critical, and literary.  Each Longman Cultural Edition consists of the complete text of a key literary work, supplemented by helpful annotations and followed by contextual materials that reveal the conversations and controversies of its historical moment.

 

A complete list of other Longman Cultural Editions appears inside the front cover.

 

Longman Cultural Editions may be packaged at no additional cost with The Longman Anthology of British Literature and Masters of British Literature, Volumes A and B.

 

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Edition details

• Publisher: Amereon Limited
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0891902716
• ISBN 13: 9780891902713
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 282