Kim (Macmillan Collector's Library) - Hardcover

Kipling, Rudyard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 190962182X ISBN 13: 9781909621824

Publisher: Macmillan Collector's Library, 2016

Synopsis

Designed to appeal to the book lover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautifully bound pocket-sized gift editions of much loved classic titles. Bound in real cloth, printed on high quality paper, and featuring ribbon markers and gilt edges, Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.

Kim (1901) is one of Kipling's masterpieces. Through the story of the young orphan Kimball O'Hara, and his vocation in the Secret Service, Kipling presents a vivid picture of India, its teeming populations, religions, and superstitions, and the life of the bazaars and the road. Two men - Kim, a boy growing into early manhood and the lama, an old ascetic priest - are fired by a quest. While Kim plays the Great Game, the Intelligence-led rivalry with Russia's expansionist ambitions in the north, he is also spiritually bound to the lama and he tries to reconcile these opposing strands, while the lama searches for redemption from the Wheel of Life.

With an Afterword by David Stuart Davies.

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 Publisher

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Macmillan Collector's Library
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 190962182X
• ISBN 13: 9781909621824
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 404