Rudyard Kipling: Selected Stories

    

     Kipling may be, for many of us, a writer we either think we know by means of "The Jungle Book" or "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" or because we're so familiar with "If", or on the other hand one we're happy to overlook as he smacks of Empire, and is easily dismissed as stuffy and dusty and old hat. But frame him with the charm and splendour of Lutyens' buildings and Elgar's music, the power and scale - both grand and intimate - of those contemporaries, and read him as of his time and as a great writer (and remember he won the Nobel Prize for Literature) and he is worth discovering or revisiting, without doubt.

     Coming to him with an open and impressionable mind, I began his Selected Stories, perversely, with the last in the book, "The Gardener", written after the death of his only son in the Great War. It quite took my breath away. I then looked at some of the earlier pieces and moved back to the later ones. What I found was 'clean-limbed' writing, vital, vigorous, rich. There is deep emotion but almost overlaid by the stiff upper lip of matter-of-fact straightforwardness - almost but not quite, and the balance he achieves is very powerful (look at "Mary Postgate", for instance). I hadn't expected the range, either (cf "The Wish House"), and the narrative strength which carries the reader on is remarkable. And then another surprise: after reading "They" I had to put the book down as it was simply so perfect I couldn't bear to break the spell.                          

    This has been a real find for me, and my thanks to Lindsay for suggesting we read him. What did other Book Group members think? Did you give this one a miss, or are you, like me, the richer for having picked it up?

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For more information you may like to visit the Kipling Society.
You can hear Kipling read an extract from his poem "France" here.
For a book on his wider family I can recommend Judith Flanders' A Circle of Sisters: Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynter and Louisa Baldwin

(Due to lack of a vital ingredient, this month's Books and Cakes post will be coming later!)