One of the perennial questions that swirl about Rudyard Kipling is how readers who vehemently object to his conservative and imperialist politics can nonetheless take deep pleasure in his art, even when that art is underwritten by the very politics they despise. It is a measure of the bold ambition of Peter Havholm's Politics and Awe in Rudyard Kipling's Fiction that this is the precise question he seeks to answer.

Havholm believes that to read Kipling correctly, we must first understand the hard lessons in politics he learned shortly after arriving in India in 1882 to assume his position as subeditor of the official Anglo-Indian newspaper The Civil and Military Gazette. Those political lessons—delivered as much by the young journalist's father, Lockwood Kipling, as by the members of the Anglo-Indian club to which Rudyard belonged—rested upon the firm cultural view that Indians were so far below Britons in the scale of civilization that they were wholly different in kind. For Havholm, this perception of difference is key, since out of it grows for Kipling, in Indian tale after Indian tale, a sense of wonder (the “awe” in Havholm's title) at human beings who are distinctly “other” than Britons. This awareness of wonder at the strange persists throughout Kipling's career as the hallmark of his art, even after he as a writer had left India and Indians behind and taken up treating other subjects, some of which (animals, ships, and locomotives) were alterior in a nonhuman sense and others of which (Britons, Americans, Frenchmen, and South Africans) were alien in a sense that exploded entirely the difference between the strange and the familiar.

Havholm's argument about otherness draws upon reader-response theorists, particularly Wayne Booth and Martha Nussbaum, who focus upon the connection between the emotional and the ethical in our reading experiences. Nussbaum distinguishes between the majority of art, which arouses emotions (chiefly fear and pity) that are “eudaimonistic,” or conducive to life's flourishing, and a minority that “elicit[s] only wonder and delight, without tapping our more eudaimonistic emotions” (90). She locates this minority within art works “that please primarily by sophistication of form and do not purport to explore human concerns with time, death, love, and other eudaimonistic issues” (90). Havholm expands this minority to include works whose appeal to “wonder and delight” depends not on “the story's form” but on “its content” (91). Within this subset, Havholm places all of Kipling's fiction. As we read about his characters, so removed from our realm of experience, we can only wonder at them, our fear and pity attenuated by their irrelevance to our lives. Given this irrelevance, Kipling's politics—at least the implication of those politics for our own present and future—is rendered moot, and readers, such as Edward Said, who find Kipling's political positions embarrassing in the abstract can obtain guilt-free pleasure from tales about wondrously “exotic” characters and settings. With this cutting of the Gordian knot, this uncovering of “hidden simplicities” (xi), Havholm reveals a Kipling startlingly at odds with the Kipling of modern consensus, the complex, ambivalent author whose best fictions both confirm and contest the imperialist politics they invoke. Against this self-conflicted writer, Havholm holds up an author whose politics never wavered, whose self was completely unified, and whose art pursued the single aim of inspiring awe.

Simplicity has its attractions; however, simplicity in this case comes at a cost, one that involves, first, Havholm's assessment of Kipling's politics and, second, his analysis of Kipling's art. On both levels, the sacrifice of complexity brings a narrowness of focus and evaluation that weakens an otherwise fine, detailed, wide-ranging, and provocative monograph. In his study of Kipling's political apprenticeship, Havholm looks primarily at the outrage provoked among Anglo-Indians by the 1883 Ilbert Bill, which would have permitted Indian judges to try Europeans outside of major cities in India. In focusing upon the effect of this controversy on Kipling's political sensibility, Havholm is rigorous. He is likewise precise in his treatment (a treatment that includes some excellent archival work) of Lockwood Kipling's views on Indians, a powerful influence upon his son's political and cultural attitudes at this time. However, a comprehensive approach to the formation of Kipling's politics needs to include much more than the furor over the Ilbert Bill and the shaping pressures of Lockwood's views. What about Kipling's infancy in India or the hell he endured at Southsea or his schoolboy experience at Westward Ho! or his insomniac, nighttime rambles through the streets of Lahore and Allahabad? Surely, these had some influence on his politics, too. Consideration of these influences might have enriched Halvholm's analysis of Kipling's relationship with his early Anglo-Indian readers. Pace Havholm, Kipling did not always echo perfectly the political opinions of his club and his father, nor was his slyly satirical art always popular with an often hidebound Anglo-Indian readership.

Havholm's analysis of Kipling's fiction is also oddly truncated. He is wrong, I think, to extend Nussbaum's category of noneudaimonistic fiction to include considerations not only of form but also of content. It is untrue that when we read a Kipling story, we only wonder. “Lispeth,” for example, is not simply “a grim party trick,” whose wronged hill-woman protagonist we regard with distant awe (106); it is a moving tale that evokes pity as well. By a kind of indirection, the cynical narrator in this tale stimulates rather than inhibits our compassion. The eudaimonistic payoff in Kipling's fiction is often crude, but it is nevertheless present. In “Lispeth” that payoff also includes disappointment at the conventional racial atavism of the ending. After reading, we feel wonder, pity, and a subtle disquiet at the very racial politics that Halvolm thinks impertinent to our response. This is a Kipling not of “hidden simplicities,” as Havholm contends, but of evident and baffling complexities.