Most writers, even excellent writers, know how to start a book. Often, even the best of them don’t know how to end it. Pulling off a jolly good tale that doesn’t sag in the middle like a baniya in tales of the Raj is as challenging as young Kim’s journey to the Himalayas in the Great Game to ferret out Russian spies. Stephen Alter’s The Greatest Game is his story of Kimball ‘O Hara, now in his sixties on his last undercover mission as India’s tryst with destiny waits around the corner. In the shadows a cabal, for whom the empire is a fascist-racist trope, plots assassinations to sabotage Independence. Kim is sent off to Delhi where a murderous conspiracy awaits him while new India faces a stillborn’s fate.
“I suppose you can’t tell me what mischief you were up to, Kim?” she (Kim’s friend Princess Anastasia) asks.
“I was saving India,” I reply.
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.”
Sometimes prominent characters in well written novels become caricature but Alter’s players are in no such danger. Kim’s handler and bluff policeman MacNeil is striking in manner and description, gruff and homesick for Scotland though he is part of the Great Game. A prominent role belongs to the doomed agent and Oxford scholar Srinivas who could have been the future of intelligence gathering in free India, but fate has other plans for him. The main villain Sir Denys Bromley-Pugh is—“a wicked sadistic man who has surrounded himself with sadistic louts who wouldn’t think twice about braking yore skull and leaving you to die like a dog in the ditch.”
Alter’s women are more compelling than the men: the most powerful of them, and foil to Kim’s threadbare romanticism, is the brothel keeper, the black haired Champa—his lover, conscience keeper and best friend whom he escorts to safety in Delhi. Alter explores the practical and cynical nature of their love within the parenthesis of pre-determined destiny in a chaotic time: the whore of voluptuous kindness, and mother hen to her girls who is terrified of being murdered in the Partition violence. Princess Anastasia, the ageing, retired Great Gamer is unforgettable as a “merry widow”, the relic of a departing empire who plays bridge at the Gymkhana Club and can put away whisky like a trooper, “always dressed in salwar kameez or occasionally saris, though her perfumes are French and her lingerie, Italian.”
The cameos do their job well: Mushtaq the mechanic, Kim’s savior in Chandni Chowk Yaqzan Hussein, the enigmatic spymaster Ulysses, the double agent Jubert, the murderous Lieutenant Craven and of course Lord Mountbatten who pins the George Cross on Kim in secret and protects treasonous lords because the upper classes look after their own.
Well done, Stephen Alter. Each page is worth the turn.