Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #88807 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

Review
'Those who relish Allen's India books will not be disappointed ... Rich in instruction for the current administration in, say, Basra - and better still, it's vintage Charles Allen' John Keay, LITERARY REVIEW 'Allen tells his complex story with concision, insight and wide-ranging vision' SUNDAY TIMES 'Compelling' TIMES 'A fascinating new book' SPECTATOR 'Allen marshals his formidable knowledge of British India to considerable effect ... A valuable guide' SCOTSMAN

Ferdinand Mount, SPECTATOR
'delicious detail and an unfailing command of [the] material'

LITERARY REVIEW
'Charles Allen's book ... should help to restore [Kipling] to his rightful place in the literary pantheon'

Customer Reviews

Not such a dry old stick - facinating introduction to the young Kipling
Charles Allen has produced a superb biography covering the first thirty-five years of Kipling's life. The book concentrates on Kipling's relationship with India, which Allen convincingly argues sustained most of his best work.

Today Kipling can appear an austere figure, a handle-bar moustached Imperialist advocate, with ideas on race beyond the pale of polite society. But Allen shows the young Kipling ("Ruddy") to be so much more interesting and sympathetic than the stereotype suggests.

Allen is excellent on Ruddy's early life in Bombay, his unloved years in Southsea away from his parents, his return to India and work there as a journalist, his development as a writer and return to England to become a literary superstar.

Ruddy trod new ground among writers: for example, he was the first to give a voice to the men rather than the officers in the British army. In India he talked to everyone: from Vieroys to the most downtrodden and his empathy for misfits, outsiders and slackers gave his fiction its wondrous colour and detail.

For me the most surprising elements of Kipling's life include his nocturnal explorings of native India, his visits to Lahore courtesans, his experiences with opium and his depressions. The older Kipling did much to obscure Ruddy's antics from future generations. But Allen is superb at uncovering Ruddy's secrets and they make him so much more of a sympathetic and modern man than I had previously believed.

I have not reading any of Kipling's prose since my teenage years when I struggled through the Second Jungle Book. But this book has re-awakened my interest and I shall shortly be reading Kim, which Allen considers Kipling's masterpiece.

Read this book if you are interested in learning more about what made Kipling tick, whether you have got into his works yet or not. Also read this book if you are interested in the Raj. Allen makes this far-away world come alive.

A fascinating insight to Kipling's background
As a nutritional anthropolgist and writer Deadly Harvest: The Intimate Relationship Between Our Health and Our Food, I have a professional interest in the local color in India back in Victorian times. In this book I was not disappointed.

I had no idea Kipling was such a precocious, bumptious and opinionated young man. How he matured so young! And of course that terrible time in the Southsea foster home. He was also quite a lad, seemingly with all kinds of dalliances, especially in Simla. It all goes to explain how he could write a poem like "The Ladies".

Incredible how he developed such a deep understanding of the East. Breaking convention and wandering the streets of the native cities by night and making all kinds of unconventional acquaintances and soaking up novel experiences. That was the local color so wonderfully exemplified by his novel Kim Kim (Penguin Classics), and his Ballad of East and West.

Kipling also did something that no Sahib had done before: talk to the ordinary Tommy in the barracks and absorb all the terrible privations they suffered. That is how he could write a short story like "The Drums of the Fore and the Aft" in The Man Who Would be King: and Other Stories(Oxford World's Classics) and searing poems like Danny Deever Collected Verse of Rudyard Kipling.

Charles Allen only sounds one false note when, seemingly as a a sop to the politically correct, he is unnecessarily apologetic about Kipling and his time. Quite uncalled for! Kipling's works display a wonderful understanding and sympathy for humanity in general. How lucky we are to have his works as an insightful record of the British Raj.