#kipling_rudyard

E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

(1910s English girl confused by experience of the Raj)

Between Two Worlds

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust  (Englishwoman contrasts modern India with her aunt"s 1920s experience)

James Clavell, Shogun  (American becomes samurai in 17th-century Japan)

John Le Carre, The Perfect Spy  ("autobiography" of ipper-echelon British spy - and double-agent, trying to discover where his loyalty lies)

Henry James, The Ambassadors  (rich 1900s Americans take "culture" to Europe, find it more civilised than they expected)

Confused Emotions

R.K. Narayan, The Vendor of Sweets  (devout Hindu in rural India dismayed by son"s "progressive" ways)

V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas  (Indian Hindu in Jamaica caught between dependence on his wife"s all-engulfing family and his longing to lead his own life)

L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between  (small boy in 1910s England carries love-messages, emotions he only dimly understands)

Paul Theroux, Fong and the Indians  (Indian shopkeeper struggling to survive in rural, tribal Africa)

Willa Cather, My Antonía  (daughter of 19th-century Bohemian immigrants growing up in rural Nebraska)

Imperialism, Good and Bad

Timothy Mo, An Insular Possession  (blockbusting novel about English imperialism in Honk Kong)

James Blish, A Case of Conscience  (should mineral-rich planet be exploited at expense of native inhabitants" life and culture?)

James Blish, A Case of Conscience  (should mineral-rich planet be exploited at expense of native inhabitants" life and culture?)

Rudyard Kipling, Kim  (adventures of Anglo-indian boy in heyday of Raj)

Twilight of Empire

Paul Scott, Staying On  (plight of English in India after independence)

Peter Vansittart, Three Six Seven  (Romanised Britons watching advance of barbarism after 4th century collapse of Roman power)

Morris West, The Ambassador  (Us ambassador in Vietnam, appalled by his country"s action there)

Gerald Seymour, Field of Blood  (underover SAS officer hunts IRA suspect in present-day Belfast)

British writer of novels, short stories and plays (1874-1965)

A tireless traveller (especially in the Far East), Maugham wrote hundreds of short stories based on anecdotes he heard or scenes he observed en route. Many of them were later filmed: Rain', for example (about a missionary on a cruise-liner in Samoa struggling to reform a prostitute, and losing his own soul in the process), was made half a dozen times. Maugham's novels used true experience in a similar way, shaping it and drawing out its meaning but keeping close to real events. Liza of Lambeth (1897) is about a Londonslum girl tormented by her neighbours for conceiving a bastard child. Of Human Bondage (1915) is the story of an orphan, bullied at school because he has a club foot, who struggles to find happiness as an adult, is ravaged by love for a worthless woman, and settles at last to become a country doctor. The stockbroker hero of The Moon and Sixpence (1919) gives up career, wife and family to become a painter in the South Seas, as Gauguin did. Cakes and Ale (1930) is an acid satire about the 1930s London literary world; Maugham avoided libel suits only by claiming that every writer it pilloried was just another aspect of himself.

Maugham's other novels include The Trembling of a Leaf, The Casuarina Tree, The Razor's Edge and Catalina. His Complete Short Stories and Collected Plays (from 1907--32 he wrote two dozen successful plays, mainly comedies) were published in the 1950s. A Writer's Notebook and The Summing Up give fascinating insights into the balance between his life and work.

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To Liza of Lambeth : Emile Zola, The Boozer (L'Assommoir) Arthur Morrison, A Child of the Jago

To Of Human Bondage : C.P. Snow, Strangers and Brothers Jerome Weidman, Fourth Street East

To The Moon and Sixpence : Joyce Cary, The Horse's Mouth

To Cakes and Ale : Rose Macaulay, Crewe Train J.B. Priestley, The Image Men

To the short stories : Guy de Maupassant, Boule de Suif Rudyard Kipling, Wee Willie Winkie R.L. Stevenson, Island Nights' Entertainment Paul Theroux, World's End

British short-story writer and poet (1865-1936)

Kipling learned his craft working for English-language newspapers in India in the 1880s. He wrote reports, stories and poems about the British soldiers and administrators, their servants and the snake charmers, fortune-tellers and other characters of the towns they lived in. Later, during the Boer War, he worked as a correspondent in South Africa, where he was a friend of Cecil Rhodes. Under the circumstances, it would have been hard for him not to reflect the imperialist attitudes of his age, first sunny confidence and then the jingoistic panic which overtook it in late Victorian times. But he is a more rewarding writer than this suggests. His sympathies were always with subordinates -- with private soldiers rather than generals, servants rather than employers, children rather than adults. He wrote well about all three: his stories for and about children, in particular, are magnificent. Something like half of each collection - most books contain both stories and poems -- is nowadays hard to take, not least where he writes in baby-talk (as in the Just-So-Stories, O best-beloved) or uses funny spellings to evoke Cockney or Irish speech. But every archness is balanced by a gem of insight or sensitivity. In this, too, he was characteristic of his time.

KIM  (1901) This episodic novel is the story of a British orphan brought up as a beggar in Lahore, who becomes first the disciple of a wandering Buddhist monk and then an agent of the British secret service. He travels throughout India, and Kipling uses his adventures as a framework for descriptions of everyday scenes and characters, of such a river of life as nowhere else exists in the world'.

Kipling's collections include Barrack-room Ballads, The Seven Seas and The Years Between (verse), Soldiers Three (stories), and the mixed prose-and-verse collections Many Inventions, Traffics and Discoveries, A Diversity of Creatures and Captains Courageous, and his children's books include the Just So Stories, the Jungle Book, Puck of Pook's Hill and the public-school Stalky and Co. Something of Myself is a guarded autobiography.

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Plain Tales from the Hills

Debits and Credits

To his stories about colonial adults : Noël Coward, 'Short Stories' his short stories J.G. Farrell, The Siege at Krishnapur about the 1857 Indian 'Mutiny', match Kipling's insight into the heyday of the Raj. John Masters, Nightrunners of Bengal W. Somerset Maugham, Orientations many short stories deal with the English at large in the enpire Paul Scott, The Raj Quartet

To Kipling's stories about children : Katherine Mansfield, Bliss and Other Stories