With Kim gone to a better place I'm into a McMurtry now

With Kim done his mountain adventures and safely back in the lowlands I've moved on to a McMurtry which actually is "Brilliant. . . funny and dangerously tender" just as the Time cover blurb proclaims.

First "Kim". In a scant 411 small hardbound pages Kipling took me from the heat of Sind to the cold of the Hindu Kush and, more importantly, into the minds of representatives of more than a dozen castes, races and tribes. And he developed Kim from a wild and wily bazaar boy into a disciplined servant of the Raj in The Great Game. Why haven't I systematicly read all of Kipling's work? I've never read one of his that failed to please and satisfy, never listened to one as a book tape that failed to sadden with its ending. I shall plunder Wolfgang Books of every cheap used copy of Kipling the next time we go to Phoenixville for dinner.

Next "All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers." What can one say of McMurtry? His characters really do leap off the page. Danny, it's true, is probably a thinly disguised Larry McMurtry in his much younger days - the book was copyrighted in 1972, but still. . . such a gift to be able to move as effortlessly as McMurtry does from introspection to conversation to preposterous action and all the while hold the reader by the throat.

I've mostly avoided McMurtry's more or less contemporary fiction despite how much I liked "Comanche Moon,""Lonesome Dove," and the other two novels that dealt with Gus, Woodrow, Buffalo Hump, Famous Shoes and Blue Duck. But I think I'll also pillage the McMurtry section at Wolfgang as well when I next get there.

There are now four cute little fawns gyreing and gimballing around the lawn

There are now four cute little fawns gyreing and gimballing around the lawns, and up and down the paths. Their happy sense of freedom and youth, and their air of utter irresponsibilty almost, almost, make me loath to envision their taut little chests adorned with the fletched shafts of the arrows which will soon be their doom. For they have again been at the daylily buds, despite the deer repellent I sprayed.

Gather ye lily buds while ye may little fawns, for thy hour cometh. This fall you will happily retire to the places under the apple trees for a little snack of fallen fruit and then you will be no more. You can no more escape your fate to become venison stew than Kim can escape his fate to spend dreary days and weeks, and months and years, at the St. Xavier school being filled with the book learning he needs to fulfill his destiny.

Free at last, free at last, good God Almighty I'm free at last

Yesterday I finally finished "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell," and I have to say that the last 300 pages went a lot faster and easier than the first 700 pages. All in all it pays back for being a tough read - but I was glad to be shut of it.

And I was glad to be able to start "Kim," which I have been meaning to read for a long time. What a contrast! First off Kipling grips you by the throat by the end of the first page, and secondly he manages to communicate more of the complex atmosphere of India during the Raj in his first 100 pages than Susanna Clark is able to evoke about the relatively simple atmosphere of England in the 1800's within her first 500 pages.

I'd like to write more, but Kim has been rescued/captured by the chaplains of his father's old regiment and they've put him in English clothes with the intention of sending/sentencing him to an orphanage school. He was just rescued by his Pathan acquaintance/employer, but that cruel fellow is seeming as though he will turn him back over to the Sahibs.

I need to get back to poor Kim.