A ripping yarn with a few loose threads
Kim saving India is a ripping tale of espionage, double crosses and Pink Panther-ish escapades, told in Alter's clear prose with detailed historical Raj trinkets. It is the lot of writers who attempt to storm the citadel of a master's legacy to buckle under the weight of the classic; those who write fake Sherlock Holmes stories fall in that category. Perhaps it is unkind to an author of Alter's calibre to call his novel a derivative follow up; he does tell a terrific yarn a lesser man may not have been able to execute in a pukka fashion.
Hitler has lost the war, but his followers remain hopeful of resurrecting the defeated dream of the Aryan race, not just in Germany but among the English upper crust too. Wounded by a sharpshooter's bullet, Kim who 'may have some black Irish in me, the blood of a shipwrecked Spanish sailor in my veins perhaps' —is sent by British Intelligence to find out if the Partition is being sabotaged. From the whorehouses of Lahore, his mission takes Kim through a burning, sundered landscape where mobs roam burning trains and lynching people to the whispering lanes of Old Delhi and the quiet grandeur of Civil Lines, where conspiracies unfold with the slow rhythm of an empire crumpling, arousing his 'feral instincts'.
The plot is full of references to the original story: Freemasons, the monk who wants to finding the River of the Arrow, the teeming streets of Lahore, and Zam-Zammah—the descriptions are nostalgically beautiful: 'whenever I get bored of sitting atop the great fire breathing cannon Zam-Zammah, and lording it over my friends, I would dismount from the tarnished bronze barrel etched with inscriptions in Farsi, and cross the street to Ajaib Ghar, 'the house of wonders' as we called the Lahore Museum.' Kim can be both maudlin and realistic—'a guttersnipe who bartered his soul for a lost cause...a drunkard who dreams only of the past but has a future.'
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