Name: Quest for Kim
ISBN: 9780472086344

Peter Hopkirk

Two authors' passion for India and the Great Game

In Search of Kipling's Great Game

Quest for Kim

Sarah Sammis

Quest for Kim I received through the now defunct relay site. As I have enjoyed every Kipling book, story and poem that I've read but hadn't read Kim, I though this book would be good inspiration to get me reading Kim. Having finished Kim earlier this year I decided to read Peter Hopkirk's follow up to the book while the novel was still fresh in my head.

Hopkirk comes across through his written as the biggest fan of Kim ever. He gushes his enthusiasm and love of Kipling's novel throughout his chapters. Happily he includes illustrations of the places and items he is describing, helping to bring alive his account of his travels through Pakistan and India and his research at home in England.

My favorite chapter in both Kim and Quest for Kim is account of riding the Te-rain. In Kim's case, it is a noisy and crowded adventure whereas in Hopkirk's time it is an amusing and sometimes bewildering exercise in futility. The on-going boarder war between Pakistan and India has made the old line impossible to ride save for one very guarded weekly express train. After Hopkirk describes his impossible quest to ride the route described in Kim he goes onto outline the bloodshed that happened on this train line during the partition in August 1947.

Hopkirk gives a chapter for each major even in Kim, even if he is unable to find through research definitive answers to a location's whereabouts or history. In the chapters where his research draws a blank he pads the chapters with plot synopsis. In all fairness, he does warn early on that he had to force himself to just reiterate Kipling's book even though he was tempted out of his love for the book. As this book reads more like a personal question than a scholarly analysis these momentary lapses into plot summary are forgivable.

This book is for all those who love Kim, that masterpiece of Indian life in which Kipling immortalized the Great Game. Fascinated since childhood by this strange tale of an orphan boy's recruitment into the Indian secret service, Peter Hopkirk here explores the many mysteries surrounding Kipling's great novel. He shows that most of the characters - Kim himself, the old Tibetan lama, Colonel Creighton, Mahbub Ali, Lurgan Sahib and the Babu (agent R17) - were inspired, in whole or in part, by actual individuals. Likewise, its locations are real - all of them familiar to the young Kipling when, more than a century ago, he worked as a reporter on a Lahore newspaper. Although Hopkirk trailed Kim and the lama across India and Pakistan, this is less a travel book than a literary detective story. It is not even essential to have read Kim in order to enjoy it, for Kipling's narrative is carefully sketched in as Hopkirk's quest unfolds. Because its hero is a teenage boy, many people mistakenly believe Kim to be a children's book.

Quest for Kim In Search of Kipling's Great Game

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