Kim (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) - Rudyard Kipling [11]
In his work as a spy the well-trained Kim uses many disguises, various languages, knowledge of the Koran and of medicine, codes and theft, surveying and mapmaking, weaponry and technical expertise, as well as physical violence against the enemy. But his specialty is an intuitive and highly profitable eavesdropping. In a characteristic posture at the beginning of the novel, he “laid himself down, his ear against a crack in the heat-split cedar door, and, following his instinct, stretched out to listen and watch” (p. 10) the lama’s conversation with the curator of the museum. (The “heat-split cedar” makes the scene absolutely convincing, and it’s significant that though the curator gives the lama a pair of spectacles, he never learns to see the world through Western eyes.) After delivering Mahbub’s cryptic message to the English officer, Kim “lay close in the grass and wormed nearer to the house” (p. 39), where security is extremely poor, and gets his first taste of real power by learning that his message has activated the British plan for war against the rebellious kings on the Northern Frontier. He also overhears the lama talking to the widow of Kulu, Mr. Bennett speaking to the soldiers, and, most significantly, the villains plotting to murder Mahbub.
The Russian and French spies, operating in hostile territory, employ in a cruder form the same methods as the British. But they fail because of their insensitivity to local custom, unconvincing disguise as hunters (they buy their trophies instead of killing them), and blundering violence against the lama, enabling Kim to capture their secret documents. Kim, like the British, thinks of the Russians as Asiatics, though their supposed racial alliance affords no greater understanding of subject peoples. It’s worth noting that when Kim struggles against Mr. Bennett, he kicks him in the stomach; when he fights the Russian, the rules of combat are waived and he kicks him in the groin. But all tactics are justified. Kipling, like almost all his contemporaries, believed in the philanthropic justification of imperialism. As Maugham wrote of the British in India: “They kept the peace. They administered justice. They built the roads, the bridges, the railways. They fought famine, flood and pestilence. They treated the sick.”17 Kipling’s portrayal of the romantic, simplistic struggle of good against evil belongs to the adventurous, even boyish tradition of Arthur Conan Doyle and John Buchan, in contrast to the disenchanted realism and moral ambiguity of modern spy novels: Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Maugham’s Ashen-den, Graham Greene’s The Human Factor, and John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In from the Cold.
Loyalty—to the British cause—is a dominant theme in the novel. Kim is loyal to his race rather than to his culture and, though Ireland was then under British domination, chooses a British rather than Irish identity. In doing so he absorbs the finest qualities of his three English mentors—Strickland’s knowledge of the natives, Lurgan’s linguistic talents, and Creighton’s ability to plumb the Oriental mind—and becomes an expert player of the Game. The Afghan Mahbub remains loyal to the British after the Afghan Wars, just as the Indian Rissaldar-major remained loyal during the Indian Mutiny. “‘A madness ate into all the Army,’ ” the major recalls, “ ‘and they turned against their officers” ’; he saw “ ‘the land from Delhi south awash with blood”’ (p. 53). Even the Woman of Shamlegh, educated by the English and then betrayed by an Englishman, helps Kim—though she also tries to seduce him.
Kim asks: “ ‘How can a man follow the Way or the Great Game when he is so-always pestered by women?”’ (p. 248). But Kipling also reveals, in the subtlest and most elusive part of the novel, that the pedophile Lurgan (the male complement to the Woman of Shamlegh) also tries to seduce Kim. When Kim first enters Lurgan’s enticing curiosity shop, he notices the strikingly sensuous “soft-eyed Hindu child,” self-satisfied and in a privileged place, “sitting cross-legged under the table of pearls with a little smile on his scarlet lips