Kipling: A Selection of His Stories and Poems, Volume 1, edited by John Beecroft – I picked this book up at a church book sale back in college, and had it sitting around on various shelves before starting to read it a few years ago. Then I set it aside again, and got back to it recently when thinking about sloth bears in relation to Jambavan and remembering that I’d never read The Jungle Book. And I guess I still haven’t read all of it, but I’ll get to that later. It was definitely worth reading, but I did find Kipling’s prose a bit sluggish at times.
Kim is a novel about an orphan boy of Irish parentage who grows up in India in the late nineteenth century, and variously hangs out with a lama, attends an English boarding school, and spies for the British. He explores a lot of India, and there’s a lot about the various cultures living there. Kipling was notoriously pro-colonialism (white man’s burden and all that), but still seemed to have at least some respect for the native population.
This book contains all of the Mowgli stories from both volumes of The Jungle Book, as well as the related poems, but none of the other stuff. As I’ve known the Disney film since childhood, these were the ones I was most curious about. It has a rather different tone than the movie, slower and more philosophical. The animals have their own law that allows for them to live together and make truces with each other, even while some of them eat others. There’s an emphasis on predators asking permission to hunt. Mowgli is able to gain influence over most of the animals, a bit of pro-human propaganda. Bagheera and Baloo are both here, but the former has more of a parental relationship toward Mowgli, while the latter is a serious teacher of the law, kind of the reverse of how Disney presented them. Then again, Baloo is still lazy. Kaa is actually a friend of Mowgli’s, who helps Bagheera and Baloo rescue the man-cub from the Bandar-Log monkeys. There’s no insistence from the panther that Mowgli leave the jungle either; he does end up going to live with humans, but it’s his own decision after his jungle friends have grown old and/or died. At one point, the elephant Hathi tells a fable about how tigers got their stripes, and why they sometimes kill for fun.
I was already familiar with the Just So Stories, as I had a book of them when I was a kid, with full-color illustrations. I think they might have been the ones by J.M. Gleeson and Paul Bransom, as they look familiar, especially this one from “How the Camel Got His Hump.”
I remember the bit about the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River in “The Elephant’s Child.” This river flows along the northern border of South Africa, then through Mozambique. There are other specific locations mentioned in these stories, the one about the whale using not a place name but a latitude and longitude, fifty degrees north and forty west, east of Newfoundland. Again, this volume omits a few of the stories, the ones that don’t focus on animals. They’re a modern take on old fables explaining why something is the way it is, almost a parody of the genre, although I suspect there was an element of humor to the old tales as well. The whale gets a small throat because a shipwrecked mariner ties a grating into it with his suspenders, and the animal imitates a train conductor. The rhinoceros has loose skin because a man he’s stolen from drops cake crumbs in it. They tend to use a single animal character as a stand-in for all animals of its type, again a staple of the genre. These started as bedtime stories Kipling told his daughter, which she insisted he tell exactly the same way every time, hence the title. And these are short and lively enough that the sluggishness doesn’t apply.
Finally, Puck of Pook’s Hill is about two children meeting Puck, who goes on to pull various figures from English history and mythology into the present to tell their stories. These include Wayland the blacksmith, a Norman knight, a Roman centurion, and a Jewish moneylender. There’s a connection between many of the tales. It’s an enjoyable idea with some clever bits, like Puck explaining that gods don’t usually last in England. It’s also interesting that the Roman identified Puck as a faun. Overall, though, it seemed a bit slow, and a lot of it was just monologue from the visitors, without much interaction with the kids.
VoVatia 