Kipling

was one of the best short-story writers who has ever lived, but only one of his full-length novels, KIM is completely successful. It tells the story of a little Irish boy, the son of a dead soldier, living a street-life in Lahore – in those days, half a century before the existence of Pakistan, still part of the British Raj. Part of the enjoyment of the book, if you do enjoy it, is Kim’s skill in passing himself off as an Indian street-child. In the opening chapters, he is dirty and deeply sun-burned; in the later parts, after he has been rescued by the Army and compulsorily educated at a Catholic boarding-school, he has to “black up”, going to back-street “salons” to dye his skin in order to do his work – which is that of an undercover agent in “The Great Game”. This game is espionage, and the discovery of Russian agents who are trying to undermine the British Empire. British paranoia especially concentrated itself on the Punjab, and the fear that the Russians, with the aid of the Afghans, might push through the north western borders of the Empire and undermine, or actually destroy, the British power.

This sounds Le Carre-esque, but the book is more subtle than this. For, while being a spy story in its loose narrative structure, it is also a love story – a double love story. First, it is an account of the love between Kim, the little Irish urchin, and a strange old Tibetan priest, who fetches up outside the Museum in Lahore where Kipling’s father, the artist Lockwood Kipling, was the director. The other love-story (Kipling’s own, evident in every paragraph, Kim’s and the Lama’s, is love for India).

The Lama from Tibet is on a spiritual quest – to find