The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories

Not having visited a newsroom yet myself, I don’t know how accurate Kipling’s description of the Bombay Mail at the opening of The Man who would be King is, but it’s exactly how I’ve always imagined, understandable given the author was working as a journalist in India when writing these stories. Evocatively expressed between semi-colons, this is a disorganised chaos of humanity working against the odds in a barely comfortable, stiflingly humid atmosphere, to produce a coherent message or at the very least fill a newspaper's columns with informative content from some mostly reputable sources. Kipling’s style is an acquired taste, as messy but flavoursome as the cuisine of the country he’s evoking, only really gaining momentum in those stories with a vivid, psychologically challenging idea like The Haunted Rickshaw or At Twenty-Two, in which a mining disaster inspired by Emile Zola’s Germinal is transposed to Kipling's country of origin. ( )

The best story in this volume is of course the title story, "The Man who would be King."  A long time ago, I saw and loved the film version with its incomparable cast, and the story is every bit as good as the film had lead me to anticipate.  Like much of Rudyard Kipling, it's able to gently poke fun at the follies of imperialism, which maybe isn't the reaction we postmoderns want, but it's enjoyable all the same.  Carnehan and Dravot are two men who've been let down by imperialism-- they went and conquered India, and what did it get them?-- and so they decide to run it for themselves, with the consequences you might anticipate.  The way the narrative jumps between distant and personal, sometimes disintegrating, is particularly effective. (It helps to imagine Michael Caine reading it.)

Other than Kim, this was my first encounter with Kipling.  His body of short fiction is apparently massive; this book brings together just seventeen pieces.  (Disappointingly, none of his science fiction is represented.)  As in any body of work, some worked for me and some did not.  It's a varied body of work; aside from taking place in India, the stories here have very little in common.  There are comedies and tragedies, tales of British soldiers and first-person narratives of Indian natives.

One tale of a British soldier, "The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes" might not be science fiction, but it uses tropes that turn up in many a science fiction tale, with a traveler trapped in a land seemingly outside of time. (I am personally thinking of the Star Trek cartoon "The Time Trap" and a Silver Age Green Arrow comic, but I am sure there are better examples.)  It was definitely one of the stronger tales here.  I didn't always get along with the tales of the British upper crust hanging out in India; skimming back over stories like "A Wayside Comedy" or "The Education of Otis Yeere," I realize that I barely remember what happened.  I really wanted to like "With the Main Guard," which is narrated by Three Soldiers alternatingly, but though the narrative device was interesting, the story itself was so-so.  On the other hand, "Only a Subaltern" was more fun that I expected going in.

From the Indian perspective, we also get strong stories in "Gemini," a black comedy about a man and his twin brother who disenfranchises him in every way possible, "At Twenty-Two," about a group of mine workers, and "In Flood Time," about a bridge keeper, among others.  These stories work in a large part because they immerse the reader in a society that's (probably) not his own; I've read several articles that say Kipling's significance to science fiction is not the science fiction he actually wrote, but rather his worldbuilding techniques, and reading stories like this, I can see that.  The techniques that Kipling's uses are ones that any contemporary reader of sf takes for granted.  They're often even told from the first person, an immersive move that makes for difficult yet rewarding reading.

The tales that explicitly deal with the intersections between the two worlds are also fascinating.  Kipling isn't really for or against colonization, as far as I can tell from reading these stories.  It's simply something that's happened, and he deals with its effects.  Sometimes these are funny (I love the story of the misguided missionaries in "The Judgment of Dungara") but of course there's a decent amount of tragedy running around too.  More usually, a story is both ("On the City Wall," for example.)

Other than the title story, the real standout was "Baa Baa, Black Sheep," a semiautobiographical tale of Kipling's own deprived childhood, separated from his parents and raised by a mentally and verbally abusive aunt.  You're completely immersed in the point-of-view of the boy, and it's harrowing and depressing, but oh so very good.  Poor kid.

It is, oddly enough, possible to read vast swathes of Victorian literature and never realize that Britain has an empire.  You might get the odd mention or subplot, but with just a prologue and epilogue set in India, The Moonstone is already an outlier.  It's odd to think that at the same time Kipling was writing these stories, Thomas Hardy is waxing rhapsodic about the English countryside in Wessex Tales.  For that different perspective on the Victorian world alone, Kipling is worthwhile, but thankfully he has a depth of insight, too.

Also: he's funny.  Best joke is when someone starts to get all philosophical, and someone else cuts her off by saying, essentially, "That's enough, George Eliot."

So I'd never read Kipling, sue me. The Man Who Would be King is one of my fav movies, and I really enjoyed the story, it told the same story, and actually it made me like the movie more, for I could then see that the added bits (it is a short story after all, you have to add something) were done very well in keeping the tone of the original story.
The other short stories in the collection, well I read a few, and I still don't like short stories. They are the fast food of literature. You can fill up your time with them, but you don't really take anything away from it. ( )

It's a difficult book for me. I did't - couldn't - read all the short stories here. They are too subtle and written in too complex a language. But what I did read, I did experience an unique writing style worth savouring. ( )

Oxford World's Classic edition 1999

This is a collection of 17 early stories by Rudyard Kipling, most of them written in 1888 while working at his first job as a journalist for an Indian weekly paper. It was these stories that first announced Kiplings arrival to the world and made him famous in England. The Oxford collection puts them in chronological order so one can watch as he matures and experiments with creating a narrative voice. The common thread is entrapment in a bad place, starting with the first story about being caught in a sand pit, to the more subtle but powerful stories about emotional entrapment's in bad relationships, and even colonial entrapment, the last title story, "The Man Who Would Be King", is among his most famous. The autobiographical story "Baa Baa, Black Sheep", which describes Kipling's own entrapment between the ages of 5 and 10 in a Dickens-like home for wayward children, is sort of the climax of the book bringing the rest together. It's interesting to see the psychological origin of Kipling's anti-colonialism, his personal quest for freedom from oppression mirrored the struggles of his adopted country.

Considering there were 17 stories, surprisingly there were only 6 that I would want to re-read again, and of those only three stood out as the best: "The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes", "Baa Baa, Black Sheep" and "The Man Who Would Be King". Two stories are notable for their Mark Twain like ability to speak in the local language and manner of the native Indian: "Gemini" and "At Flood Time" and lastly the story "Twenty-Two" is a Zola tribute to Germinal - since its one of my favorite novels and authors I was pleased to come upon it here.

Probably the best thing about reading these stories, most of them now somewhat obscure, is to discover Kipling in the same way others did. He was only 23 when he wrote most of them and his energy and optimism shine through leaving one wanting to see what he comes up with next.

--Review by Stephen Balbach, via CoolReading (c) 2008 cc-by-nd ( )