Book Review: The Greatest Game- Being the Further Adventures of Kimball O’Hara by Stephen Alter
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Namrata reviews The Greatest Game- Being the Further Adventures of Kimball O’Hara by Stephen Alter (Aleph Book Company, 2025), calling it both homage and critique.
What becomes of characters once their authors abandon them to the archive of literature? Can they, like myths, return to speak across time?
In The Greatest Game: Being the Further Adventures of Kimball O’Hara, Stephen Alter takes up this provocation by resurrecting one of colonial fiction’s most enigmatic figures: Kim, the boy spy of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. Alter imagines him decades older, no longer the precocious wanderer of the Grand Trunk Road but a seasoned operative of the Imperial Secret Service, drawn into the violent crucible of India’s Partition.
The year is 1947. Lahore and Delhi burn with riots, communal hatreds erupt unchecked, and a conspiracy to assassinate Jawaharlal Nehru and possibly Gandhi threatens to unmake the fragile project of independence. Against this backdrop, Kim’s adversary emerges: Sir Denys Bromley-Pugh, a Nazi sympathizer bent on detonating a bomb at a Congress rally. If he succeeds, one partition will splinter into many, and India’s future will dissolve into chaos. The intrigue, with its disguises, secret rendezvous, and coded exchanges, provides the scaffolding of a spy thriller; yet Alter’s narrative reaches beyond suspense, into an allegory of identity and belonging at the twilight of empire.
