Making Demands

Am making slow but rewarding progress through The Man Who Would Be King: Selected Stories of Rudyard Kipling. I'd forgotten just how demanding he is as a writer, especially in the very short stories, particularly in terms of just how elliptical he can be. You really have to read with full attention, and then some, to pick up all the nuances.

I've just finished A Wayside Comedy and need to reread it in order to 'place' every line of dialogue, and figure out who's having an affair with whom, but don't mind doing so since it's so wonderfully acidic that I'm looking forward to suffering the full, harsh impact. And, my goodness, for a popular writer of his period Kipling is extraordinarily bracing when it comes to the representation of folly and weakness.

There isn't an ounce of sympathy, as far as I can see, for the characters in his 'comedy' - just a hard, unrelenting clarity of vision, but in a curiously amoral non-judgemental manner (except for the obvious judgement that he's dealing with fools who deserve each other.) And these are the 'colonial masters'.

I sometimes wonder how much of Kipling's harshness derives from his own experience of being bullied at his first boarding school. At times he seems something of a bully himself, as a writer. Think of the distinct strain of cruelty underlying the schoolboy stories in Stalky & Co. Yet it's the imperiousness of the narrative voice that lends so many of his tales that spell-binding quality of being so perceptively, ruthlessly, knowing.