"Kim is a window into a complex, colorful, romantic and crackling good history that ought not to be judged by today's standards". (In Search of Kipling's Inspiration).
The greatest element of the book, the thing that propels the plot, illuminates the places, brings the other characters to life, and most importantly makes you care about any of it, is Kim himself. Kimball O'Hara must be one of most lovable, believable, absorbing characters in all of literature. Kipling's quintessential urchin is streetwise, clever, courageous; yet unmistakably still a kid, capable of boredom, fear, and loneliness.
He's also complex, for example, it's established early on in the story that Kim is not above cynically exploiting other people's
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. . a rich and absolutely fascinating, but nevertheless profoundly embarrassing novel". (Said p.45).
Kim is also a fascinating depiction of a clash between religions and cultures. Without seeming to make a big deal out of it, Kim is a story of Hindus, Buddhists, Jainists, Sikhs, Muslims, and Christians rubbing shoulders with varying degrees of respect and tolerance. Characters frequently switch languages in mid-conversation, either to facilitate comprehension, underscore particular social or religious meanings, or exclude certain people.
Credit here must be given to Kipling for doing a fantastic job at transliterating different accents and dialects. That's usually difficult for an author to pull off convincingly, but here it is flawlessly done. Particularly effective is when Kim and other characters switch from translated Hindi, fluent and full of thees and thous, to transliterated English that comes out like "Oah, I am verr-ee sorr-ee, Sahib," and can't help but be read with the author's intended diction and
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These characters are correlated by affection and a sense of responsibility rather than by ties of blood. The novel emphasizes the importance of networks between people who can outfit financial, emotional, and professional morale support for one another. simultaneously, Kipling's emphasis on personal attachment has some definitive political implications. For instance, the novel describes the fictional insurrection and rebellion against British authority by the Five Kings in the north of India as treason and betrayal of the personal ties between colonial India and the British Empire. Kim has bonds of moral and emotional rightness between India and Britain that has made him such a controversial.
Race exists in Kim. We figure out on the first page that, underneath Kim's darkly tanned burned black skin as any native, Kim is still white. The reason for this attention to race is historical and important. Rudyard Kipling is writing about India during the era of British colonial domination at the turn of the twentieth century. The people are mixed up from different nationalities, ethnic groups, and religions. But even though people of many cultures appear in Kim, the different characters have different economic and social