Plain Tales from the Hills (Penguin Classics)

Rudyard Kipling was 32 when his first collection of short stories, PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS, was published in 1888. He had first issued 28 of them in the pages of his Anglo-Indian employer, The Civil and Military Gazette of Lahore, India (1886-7). *** The 40 short stories are of high quality and soon won for the young author a readership in India, Britain and America that propelled him to the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. Most of the characters displayed are British (including Irish) men, women and children. The men are often young Lieutenants (Subalterns) or enlisted men just assigned to a British or Native regiment in Queen Victoria's India. Less often the men are in business or are civil servants, married or not, assigned to running a district of several hundred thousand natives or advising the rulers of Princely States. *** Romance is a major theme. Thus the tale, "The Strength of a Likeness," begins: "Next to a requited attachment, one of the most convenient things that a young man can carry about with him at the beginning of his career, is an unrequited attachment. It makes him feel important and businesslike, and blase, and cynical." A couple of pages later: 'Open and obvious devotion from any sort of man is always pleasant to any sort of woman." *** From April to October things are so hot in India's Plains that the officers and civilians send their womenfolk and children to cool Hill Stations at 6,000 feet or higher. Thus, Simla, in the Himalyan foothills, became the summer capital of British India. Kipling's newspaper sent him there to file reports. And he observed the going ons of Viceroys, Commanders in Chief, older women who delighted in wrapping subalterns around their fingers and natives interacting with their white rulers. *** PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS contain more than one excellent ghost story, premonitions of death, the trials of boredom, ill health (especially the threat of cholera and typhoid), career frustrations, barely understood relations with the Hindus and Muslims being ruled and miitary and spying adventures in Burma and Afghanistan. *** In my own reading experience and judgment, a dozen or more of the PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS deserve appearing in any anthology of the world's finest short stories. Read a few and see if you agree! -OOO-