The Cambridge Companion to Rudyard Kipling (Cambridge Companions to Literature)

Editor of 2011's THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO RUDYARD KIPLING is Howard J. Booth, lecturer at the University of Manchester. In addition to his own excellent Introduction and Chapter 10, "The later short fiction," Booth has assembled penetrating monographs in English by 12 other authors from America, Scotland, England, New Zealand, India and Italy. *** Topics range over Kipling's busily writing in London in the 1890s, the British Empire, over the extraordinary and rarely noticed relationships of Rudyard Kipling with the USA (which produced his closest male friend, his wife, Vermont-born children and much more), his pioneering fascination with technology and science fiction, over Kipling's attitudes toward war, men v. women, children (THE JUNGLE BOOKS, KIM, JUST SO STORIES, etc.), the many voices in which he spoke prose and poetry, the short fiction of his sadder, later years, over Kipling's place in so called "post-colonial" literature, over the way Rudyard's father John Lockwood Kipling illustrated his son's works and how Kipling is read (or ignored) in today's India. *** Here are three selected highlights: (1) Kipling's 1891 novel, THE LIGHT THAT FAILED, has two different endings. In the second (book) version the painter hero Dick tries but fails to impose on his painter girl friend Maisie a stereotyped female role as his "beloved" and therefore as his destined helpmate wife. She cannot see how to reconcile her passion to be a successful painter with marrying Dick and opts decisively for painting. But in the earlier (magazine serialized) version, Maisie in the end succumbs to a lifetime of tending to the needs of by now fully blind Dick (Ch. 1, Robert Hampson). (2) In Chapter 5, "Kipling and Gender," University of Kent's Kaori Nagai gives many examples of Kipling's treatment of women. In chapter end note 10, Nagai says that she focuses exclusively on the later version of THE LIGHT THAT FAILS because it is "a unique text in Kipling's oeuvre, as the heroine manages to escape the hero's control. *** (3) I found Indiana University's Patrick Brantlinger's Chapter 9, "Kim" extraordinarily good and thought-provoking about the 1907 Nobel Prize in Literature winner's much acclaimed novel of 1901. KIM is described by Kipling himself as "picaresque." For Kimball O'Hara (Kim) a young Irish scamp born and orphaned in India is off and away on three open-ended quests: (a) for "a red Bull on a green field" (his father's Irish regiment) which (b) leads him to be selected and trained as young spy for the British Secret Service in the "Great Game" being played out against expansionist Tsarist Russia and (c) in a completely different direction: volunteering to be Tibetan Teshoo Lama's chela or disciple as the two roam northern India searching for the river where an arrow shot by Lord Buddha fell long ago. *** The amiable Irish orphan, skin tanned dark as any Indian's and fluent in several native tongues, does not lack for foster-fathers. If Kim plays Cervantes's Sancho Panza to dreamy, idealistic Teshoo Lama's Don Quixote, Kim is also at some level the celibate Red Lama's son. Other father figures of every religious stripe include "a Muslim in Mahbub Ali, and a hybridised Hindu in Hurree Babu ... an occultist (Lurgan Sahib), a Roman Catholic (Father Victor) and an Anglican (Revd Arthur Bennett). *** At novel's end, which author Brantlinger calls "A happy unending," young Kimball O'Hara is still an adolescent. He has yet to make a final choice between serving either Buddhism or the British Raj. Only service in the Irish regiment seems definitively ruled out: the Lama refused to see his chela educated to be a killer. Throughout all his dangerous adventures Kim remains supremely happy (except when briefly bullied during terms at Saint Xavier's school for Sahibs, for attending which the Lama donates the money). Kimball O'Hara remains throughout what he was shown to be from the beginning, "the Friend of all the World." He is "happiness personified...left in a still-adolescent state ... -- he can have his cake and eat it too. ... (Kim's) is a lost dream of possibility for an eternal childhood in an imagined India." As the novel itself declared, within the framework of a passionately relived love story between Kipling and India, the land of his birth in 1865, "Kim dived into the happy Asiatic disorder which, if you only allow time, will bring you everything that a simple man needs." *** THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO RUDYARD KIPLING seems to presuppose that its readers already know their Kipling, at least his major prose works and the most quoted two dozen of his more than 700 poems (e.g., "The Ballad of East and West," "Danny Deever"). As expected, this collection of learned monographs gives in adequate detail the impressive credentials of its 13 contributors. The chapter end notes provide a treasure trove of sources. Editor Howard J. Booth ends the volume with FURTHER READINGS in Kipling's own works, with Collections, editions and reference, Biographical studies and Criticism as well as with a solid 7-page Index. It is hard to fault THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO RUDYARD KIPLING and I for one shall not make that effort. -OOO-