Kim rudyard kipling book5/27/2023 ![]() But while ripping yarns can certainly be comforting, it's not the plot that makes Kim soul food of the first rank. ![]() In synopsis, then, it sounds like a Boy's Own adventure. ![]() He falls in with an itinerant Tibetan lama on a quest for a sacred river, and ends up conscripted into "the Great Game", the imperial cold war of espionage and derring-do fought on the fringes of the British Raj. Published at the threshold of the 20th century, Kim is the story of the eponymous orphan boy – of Irish descent but Indian-born, "a poor white of the very poorest" and a street urchin in the great Mughal city of Lahore. This is the ultimate comfort read, and the promise of its joy and colour is always something to cling to as you trudge across a desert of bad weather, hard work or turgid texts. I would have been happy to make do with just the latter title, for at some bleak bivouac in the Empty Quarter – or indeed at home in a British winter – Kim would offer all the warmth I could ever ask for. He could read them over and over, he said, with the joy of poetry. ![]() ![]() One was Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim the other was Rudyard Kipling's Kim. The great explorer Wilfred Thesiger usually carried just two books when he stepped into the wild. ![]()
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