The last two stories I've read by Rudyard Kipling surely massively stand in the way of any attempt to reduce him to a simplistic laureate of empire. And the fact the stories are so different in every way is a sign of his genius. I did not expect the simple unironic tenderness of the account of the marriage of Holden and Ameera in Without Benefit of Clergy or the surreal power of the conference of the Hindu gods in The Bridge-Builders and it seems to me that any attempt to interpret the stories in the light of Kipling's undoubted admiration of the ideal of Empire is doomed to fail.
Kipling's fiction is a triumph of waywardness in conservative clothing.
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