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 AudioFile
You know a novel is succeeding when you begin to hear and think in the voices of the characters--and that's doubly true of a good audiobook. Kipling's masterpiece about an orphaned British beggar boy who knows the streets and marketplaces of India better than any native would be a pleasure read plainly. But Dastor's masterful performance, which individualizes dozens of Indian and British voices, is unparalleled in artistry, wit and precision. Despite his reputation as a trumpeter of imperialism, Kipling is himself full of wit, irony and rich imagination in this tale of Kim and the Tibetan holy man, who journey "the broad, smiling river of life" that is India's great highway. Together they encounter a series of adventures as colorful and memorable as those of Huck Finn traveling down the Mississippi. But more than an action story, here is a story told in dialogue, one whose key events are exchanges of wit, whose rendering of the vernacular of British India is the thread and essence of its tale. Clearly, this is a novel that, better than almost any, lends itself to audio performance. This Cover to Cover Classic is a standout, and one of this reviewer's all-time favorite audio experiences. D.A.W. Winner of AUDIOFILE Earphones Award. (c) AudioFile, Portland, Maine


Review
?A work of positive genius, as radiant all over with intellectual light as the sky of a frosty night with stars.??The Atlantic Monthly

ANNOTATION

Kim, one of Kipling's masterpieces, is the story of the orphaned son of an officer in the Irish Regiment.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Kim (1901) is Rudyard Kipling's story of an orphan born in colonial India and torn between love for his native India and the demands of Imperial loyalty to his Irish-English heritage and to the British Secret Service. Long recognized as Kipling's finest work, Kim was a key factor in his winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. Our text is the 1901 first English edition, fully annotated for undergraduate readers and accompanied by maps of India and the Grand Trunk Road. "Backgrounds" collects selections from Kipling's autobiography, letters, short stories, and poems; four contemporary assessments, including that of the Nobel Prize Committee; an excerpt from Charles Carrington's biography of Kipling; and contextual essays by Blair Kling and Ann Parry. The thirteen interpretive essays in "Criticism" explore the novel's central themes and suggest the range of Kipling criticism from the 1950s to the present. Noel Annan, Irving Howe, Edward Said, Ian Baucom, A. Michael Matin, John A. McClure, Michael Hollington, Parama Roy, Sara Suleri, Patrick Williams, Suvir Kaul, Mark Kinkead-Weekes, and Zohreh T. Sullivan provide their varied perspectives. A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography are also included.

FROM THE CRITICS

AudioFile - David A. Walton