Reader Tim Hannigan finds a comfortable travelling companion in Kipling's 'little friend of all the world'
The great explorer Wilfred Thesiger usually carried just two books when he stepped into the wild. One was Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim; the other was Rudyard Kipling's Kim. He could read them over and over, he said, with the joy of poetry. I would have been happy to make do with just the latter title, for at some bleak bivouac in the Empty Quarter – or indeed at home in a British winter – Kim would offer all the warmth I could ever ask for. This is the ultimate comfort read, and the promise of its joy and colour is always something to cling to as you trudge across a desert of bad weather, hard work or turgid texts.
Published at the threshold of the 20th century, Kim is the story of the eponymous orphan boy – of Irish descent but Indian-born, "a poor white of the very poorest" and a street urchin in the great Mughal city of Lahore. He falls in with an itinerant Tibetan lama on a quest for a sacred river, and ends up conscripted into "the Great Game", the imperial cold war of espionage and derring-do fought on the fringes of the British Raj.
In synopsis, then, it sounds like a Boy's Own adventure. But while ripping yarns can certainly be comforting, it's not the plot that makes Kim soul food of the first rank. When Laurens van der Post was interred in a Japanese prison camp in World War II Indonesia, he found himself willing to trust a Korean informant simply because of the reassuring associations of the man's name – he was called Kim. And there's the crucial clue: what makes Kim such a glorious wellspring of comfort is its humanity. The hero is known in the alleyways of Lahore as "Little Friend of all the World", and the book revels in the joy of human company. People are good, it says; neck-deep in the "broad, smiling river of life" is a good place to be; and with Kim you can be neither cynical nor lonely.
Kipling has, of course, been roundly condemned by many a post-colonial critic, his very name made a byword for objectionable empire nostalgia. It's certainly true that the India of Kim is an unchanging place, with British rule an incontestable part of the scene. But the warm soul of the book is in its people, not its politics. It brims with Indian noise and heat and colour – a great comfort in itself when the world outside your window is slate-grey and sodden. And yet these roaring bazaars and clamorous caravanserais are peopled not with some massed and inscrutable Other; they are brim-full of friends, men and women with voices and stories of their own.
The other great solace is in the writing itself. There is style without pretentiousness, and simplicity that is neither bleak nor chiselled. It is comfort food that is somehow rich and refined at the same time, and I can read it again and again. Before the cold comfort of digital connectivity I always carried a copy of Kim on long backpacking trips as a potent charm against the horror of booklessness in remote places.
For all its comforting qualities Kim is not entirely without darkness. Towards the end of the book, buckling under the burdens of responsibility, the teenaged hero suffers one of the most convincingly drawn nervous breakdowns in English literature. But this is actually where you'll find the greatest solace of all, for in the world of Kim when a collapse comes there will always be a clean white room in a rambling farmhouse to rest in, a mighty matriarch with silver bangles and a sharp tongue to nurse you better, and friends ready to cross half a continent to check on your recovery.
And when that recovery comes – as it always does – there's the irresistible discovery that roads are simply meant to be walked upon, "houses to be lived in, cattle to be driven, fields to be tilled, and men and women to be talked to." There's no greater comfort than that.