Kipling's Kim

31:3 Book Reviews trying to represent the cunent state of Chesterton's reputation. His book, which could have benefitted from better proof reading and an index, is another praiseworthy effort to keep that reputation alive. For me finally there is something sad about much of the commentary in Conlon's anthology, though this is not the editor's fault. If Chesterton cannot find critical voices who are going to explore different avenues of approach to his fiction, he is going to remain a marginal figure in our assessment of turn-ofthe -century fiction. He is hanging on by his finger tips, as it is. Maybe he would have laughed at this caricature of his reputation today, being a goodnatured man who wrestled and pinned to the mat whatever pride roused in him. But I wish his early romances had received better recognition as remarkable artistic achievements, nanative wheels which still leave us out of breath chasing behind them as we try to fathom what it is we have apparently seen before our very eyes. William J. Scheick University of Texas at Austin KIPLING'S KIM Harold Bloom, ed. Rudyard Kipling's 'Kim'. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. $19.95 The papers here collected were first published in the years 1973-1984. In the chronology of Kipling studies, this means that they come between the 1965 centenary, with the gush of articles that accompanied it, and the expiry of the British copyrights in 1986, marked by a flood of new anthologies as well as the new paperback editions, each with its introduction. The two principal themes considered in this book are the novel as Bildungsroman and as product of its writer's art. Harold Bloom's introduction as General Editor of the series sets the tone, pointing out Kipling's debt to Walter Pater and the Victorian aesthetes , against whom he is often contrasted. The political dimension that for so long bedeviled Kipling's reputation is not stressed, but neither is it avoided. At the end, David Seed, in the most recent essay, puts the novel in the context of Empire fiction, tracing the progression of British disillusionment with imperial dreams from Kipling through Forster to Orwell. Seed's article has been chosen over two others in this kind: John A. McClure's section on Kim in Kipling and Conrad: The Colonial Fiction (1981) and Jeffrey Meyers's in Fiction and the Colonial Experience (1973). McClure's introduction and Meyers's conclusion relate their arguments to Africa rather than India: each is comparatively hostile to Kipling. In the post-imperial context, one of the most important developments in the last twenty years of Kipling studies has been the number of new commentators from the Indian sub-continent: writers such as Islam, S.S. and S.S.A. Husain, 334 31:3 Book Reviews Rao, Jamiluddin. They are here represented by the first piece in the book, a chapter reprinted from Vasant A. Shahane's Rudyard Kipling: Activist and Artist . In this extract, Shahane touches only lightly on the question of Kipling 's imperialism, since he has dealt with this matter both fully and fairly in his previous chapter. He does, however, repeat and expand Chaudhuri's suggestion in Rudyard Kipling: The Man, His Work and His World (ed. Gross, 1972) that there are aspects of Kim which Western critics often fail to understand . His concern is chiefly with "The Process of Becoming," in which Mahbub represents the road of activism and the lama the road of contemplation, while Kim seeks to synthesize the two and so find his identity. Shahane's discussion of Kipling's symbolism is also useful. The second essay looks at Kim from the other side of the imperial fence. An ex-member of the elite Indian Civil Service, Philip Mason knew the Raj from within; he is also a novelist and historian. The extract from his book Kipling : The Glass, the Shadow and the Fire places the novel in the context in which it was written. Mason notes the identity theme, but suggests that it is secondary; more important is the imaginative re-working of old, happy memories that Kipling shared with other British ex-residents...