Kim is a young orphaned boy, his Irish father and mother having died in abject poverty. Kipling loved India, his homeland, and right off the bat he gives you gorgeous portraits of the people, and the landscape, with particular focus on the bazaars and life on the road. That’s what we now call the political conflict between Russia and Britain in Central Asia, around the time of the Second and Third Afghan Wars (late 1800s, basically). So, Kim‘s story takes place against the backdrop of “The Great Game” (which I thought meant chess, but apparently not). That makes it sound like some kind of mash-up of The Alchemist and The Thirty-Nine Steps, right? Actually, that’s probably not far off… His first assignment is to capture the papers of a Russian spy in the Himalayas…” Kim, Pan Classics edition (1978) While he is accompanying a Tibetan lama on his search for the River of Immortality, Kim is picked up by the British and groomed for the Secret Service. “Kim, a young Irish orphan, is brought up in the native quarter of Lahore. The blurb on the back of this edition is hectic, and I had no idea what to make of it:
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