Extraordinary, a beautiful, rich, moving story of a boy coming of age in British India. I had heard so much of what it was (Imperialist etc) and that is just not so. It is more a Buddhist book than an imperialist and the heart of it is the love between the Red Lama and the the orphan. The picture of India is drawn with passion and love and the richness of the people and life is contrasted often with the inadequacy of some of the British. I see echoes of Kim in many of my favourite books - look at the Shasta in the Horse and His Boy, at Lyra in His Dark Materials, at John Buchann's Sandy Arbuthnot and in real life at Lawrence of Arabia... And although the adventure and spy story drive the narrative the long trip into the himmalayas is a spiritual quest the culmination of the book one of spiritual fulfilment (and something of the feel of the last chapters of Lord of the Rings also) Highly recommended! (Oddly many of my friends said they were made to read it in Scouts - and it's full of what these days would be called strong language, violence, drug use and sexual references - go Kipling!) ( )

An enjoyable read of life in colonial India at the turn of the 20th century. Kipling takes us on a delightful journey full of adventure and espionage with the help of a young Irish-Indian boy, Kim, and his teacher cum guru Buddhist monk. ( )

I missed Kim when I was reading Kipling as a kid. I really like this, part spy and adventure story, part spiritual quest. There is something soothing about how Kipling writes, and he writes such great and real characters, full of flaws and charm. ( )

A love song to India, but a weak plot. The love made it fun to read.

Kim is another of those books that comes with a great deal of baggage: some of it reasonable, some not. It would be great to be able to say simply "this is a great adventure story" and enjoy it on its own terms, but I think the reader has to be aware of at least some of the assumptions Kipling is asking us to make about the world. Penguin clearly don't want us to enjoy the book at all, as their Penguin Modern Classics edition comes with a rather depressing introductory essay and some tediously pedantic notes by the late Edward Said.

Is it a great spy story? I don't think so - although I heard Dame Stella Rimington, who may be presumed to know a thing or two about spying in India, talking it up as such on the BBC the other day. Whilst Kim's training with Lurgan Sahib is plausible, Kim's big success against the French and Russian agents is a direct consequence of their incompetence - if they'd taken any sensible precautions against counter-espionage at all, Kim and his friends would never have been able to foil their dastardly plans. Some of the tradecraft Kim is taught seems a bit suspect too - what intelligence organisation would be daft enough to give all of its agents a common recognition signal? One traitor would be enough to blow the whole organisation.

Is it a handbook for military adventures on the North-West frontier? If that's how it is being used, it might explain the current lack of progress of NATO forces in Afghanistan. Anyone who's read Peter Hopkirk's books knows that by the time Kim was written, the danger of Russian incursions into India and Afghanistan, if it ever existed, was long past. There was, as there always has been, unrest among some of the Muslim communities in the area, but Kipling doesn't tell us anything about that. Kipling's view of the Great Game is a fantasy, and probably has more to do with the costly and unsuccessful colonial war of the moment (South Africa) than with India.

Is it a primer in basic Buddhism? Probably not. There is no coherent explanation of what Buddhists actually believe, or why. We do get glimpses of the way the lama's religious beliefs help him to deal with concrete situations, but we are led to attribute his qualities to his own strength of character, as much as to his Buddhism. He is really a kind of generic holy man - he would be just as plausible if he were a Baptist or a Benedictine.

Is it imperialist? Yes, of course it is. Kipling was firmly convinced that it was the duty of the British to run India, because he felt that they could do a better job than anyone else. This was a minority view (especially in Britain itself), but it was considered a perfectly respectable political standpoint at the time, and Kipling at least had some experience of the realities of colonial India from his time as a journalist. Said is right, of course, to draw attention to the way that Kipling selectively shows us Indians who support the British Raj, and ignores other viewpoints.

Is it racist? Certainly, although the passages Said draws attention to are mostly just evidence of a failure to distinguish between racial and cultural characteristics, which is common to most writers of the period. Kipling compensates for this laziness to a large extent by the way the two most important Indian characters, Mahbub Ali and the Babu, are drawn as individuals who transcend racial stereotypes (in fact, both of them are conscious of the way Europeans stereotype them, and exploit this perception for their own ends). However, in the case of Kim, we have someone who as grown up to all intents and purposes in an Indian cultural environment, having lost his European parents at a very young age, but who nevertheless has a special destiny because of his racial origins. I don't think we can absolve Kipling of racism on this point: on the other hand, it is an assumption Kipling pushes so far into the foreground that I don't see how any modern reader of the book could fail to be conscious of it: it's simply a point that we have to accept as one of the underlying assumptions of the book.

Is it a great novel? Yes, of course! Kipling wasn't very successful with the novel in general, but this is the one place where he produced a full length novel that can stand up with the best of them. Interestingly, Said chooses to compare Kim side-by-side not with other adventure stories, but with Hardy's Jude the obscure, making the point that most novels of the period were about frustrated hopes and ambitions, but that the freedom of movement offered by a colonial setting allowed Kipling to write a novel about possibilities seized and opportunities exploited. Hardy can be put side-by-side with Kipling in other ways too: both were fascinated by the voices of ordinary working people, and produced rich, if idealised, views of traditional societies confronted by the modern age. You can certainly imagine Mahbub Ali the horse trader doing business with Michael Henchard the corn merchant. It's probably not a huge exaggeration to say that Hardy's rural Wessex would have been as remote and exotic as Kipling's India to the average urban middle-class reader in 1901. ( )