ritaxis | About Kim

I had totally forgotten most of the book, and conflated Creighton and Lurgan. A lot of it probably went right over my head when I was a kid. But I didn't get the ending this time. What's Kim going to do? Clearly the most proximate thing is to go to the river with the lama. But it seems as if Hurree Babu and Mahbub expect him to come to Lurgan's and get enlisted into the Great Game proper now that he's pulled off his first official success, and as if Kim has no such intention. I sort of think he intends to follow the lama around for the forseeable future. And what will he do when the lama dies? I must admit that, having forgotten the second half of the book, and most of what happens after the first stay at Lurgan's, I thought the lama would die immediately after finding the river, and it was unnerving to end with the lama inviting Kim to dip himself in it and "be released."
There's something in this book you just can't have these days -- an easy sensuous love among men that isn't sexual and doesn't have to explain itself. No, you can have it, but you're unlikely to. If the book isn't supposed to have a homoerotic subtext and it's full of admiring and loving between men, it has to have some kind of marker there these days.
Although I have to admit that when I was nine and read the book for the first time, I did eroticize the hell out of the book, and being entirely perverse, I identified with Lurgan's boy. I'm sure there's Kim slash, and <i>I'm not going to go find out.</i> Even though I would have been all over it when I was nine.

I wish it wasn't finished. But I don't want to reread it immediately. And I don't want a sequel. I just want more.