Rudyard Kipling was for several decades one of the most popular writers in the English-speaking world, and at a young age became the first Englishman to win the Nobel Prize for literature. It's remarkable that, setting aside collections of connected stories, he wrote only four novels: Kim (1901), Captains Courageous (1897), The Light that Failed (1890), and The Naulahka (1892). While these are not negligible, it's his short stories (including his children's books) that constitute his most important work, and among their large number (he was prolific) was a good helping of speculative fiction—science fiction, fantasy, and horror. The Mark of the Beast and Other Fantastical Tales gives us 48 stories, in order of publication, a generous sampling of Kipling's output, no matter the genre. There is a cheerful Neil Gaiman preface and an informative and efficient afterward by Stephen Jones who, presumably, picked the stories.
A caveat emptor right at the get-go, however: the book is marred by an awful failure of proofreading; it is the worst proofread book I have ever read, bar none, with an error, on average, every ten pages, some of them gross, which interfere with the reading and sometimes even ruin the sense. It's a pity; Gollancz's Fantasy Masterworks is generally an admirable series, and this may be not just a missed, but a spoiled, opportunity for speculative fiction fans, as a collection such as this will not come again soon.
Not all the selections, however, have an element of the fantastic, strictly speaking; the descriptor "fantastical" seems to include the exotic, adventurous, and horrific. In some, the fantastic element is explained away. Others are simply adventure tales, such as "The Man Who Would Be King" (1888)—unless we count the Masonic symbols discovered among the natives of, essentially, Tajikistan, or consider parts of it non-fantastic horror.
Even giving a wide allowance to "fantastical," one wonders about some of the principles of selection. "Mary Postgate" (1915), about a fortuitous and quietly savage encounter between an Englishwoman and a German flyer during WWI, hardly seems to qualify, while "The Dog Hervey" from A Diversity of Creatures (1917) is partly fantastic, and from Limits and Renewals, his last collection (1932), "Unprofessional" is science fiction and "Uncovenanted Mercies" is not only an afterlife fantasy, it's a sequel to "On the Gate: A Tale of '16" (1926), which is included. Even some marginally fantastic stories—"The Friendly Brook" (Diversity), "The Miracle of St. Jubanus" and "Fairy-kist" (both Limits) have a better claim than "Mary Postgate" or, for that matter, "The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat" (both Diversity).
Kipling's juveniles—the Just-So Stories (1902), the Jungle Book stories (1894,1895), and some of the stories from Puck of Pook's Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910), his two collections about English history and folklore—are fantastical, if not outright fantastic, but one could certainly understand an editorial decision to omit them; they alone could fill a volume this size. But then comes "The Knife and the Naked Chalk" from Rewards and Fairies, which, aside from the presence of Puck, is not really fantastic in the way of, say, "Cold Iron," the first story in that book. Why is it alone included, from all his juveniles? Why not include instead the non-Mowgli story, "The Miracle of Purun Bhagat," from The Second Jungle Book, or "In the Rukh," his adult Mowgli story, first published in Many Inventions (1893)? Certainly a a holy man warned by animals of a coming landslide, or a man raised by wolves who communicates with animals, is "fantastical."
The editor could have spared us a few others, which are brief and add nothing to the reader's enjoyment or Kipling's reputation; for instance, the prose poem "The City of Dreadful Night" (1885); "Baboo Mukerjee" (1888), evidently a political satire of its time; or the poem that begins the book, "The Vampire" (1897) which has more to do with Theda Bara than with the undead.
But there is much good, and little real cause to complain. Kipling's best-known stories deserve to be considered classics; of course, those are also the most-anthologized and most familiar, but anyone coming to them for the first time has a treat in store, and I can attest that they hold up—or are even better—for someone who has not read them for years. "The Mark of the Beast" (1890), "'They'" (1904), and "The Recrudescence of Imray" (aka "The Return of Imray") (1891) could hardly be improved on as tales. Also fine are "The Phantom Rickshaw" (1885), "The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes" (1885), "The Finest Story in the World" (1891) and "The Man Who Would Be King." There are some nice ones among the (as far as I know) less familiar tales: "By Word of Mouth" (1887) "At the End of the Passage" (1890) "The Brushwood Boy" (1895), and some of the later stories, such as "The Gardener" (1925) which Gaiman singles out for mention, deservedly. And there are nice bits and virtues in nearly all of them.
Acknowledgements list the original (usually periodical) publication of each piece, interesting and welcome information. Kipling started publishing fiction in 1884, at age 19 or so, and published a number of classic stories in the period 1885-1888, aged roughly 20 to 23. (And he won that Nobel at 42. Aspiring writers, feel free to hate him. But also read him as a model of how to tell stories with amazing economy and directness.) The felt lack of having the first book publication noted is mostly remedied by Stephen Jones's biographical and bibliographical afterward, a model of informative concision.
A couple of the stories—"With the Night Mail" and "As Easy as ABC"—are firmly science fiction, the latter especially sounding like the work of E.E. "Doc" Smith. But if we consider that "science fiction" implies nothing, per se, about the future, much of Kipling's fiction is "science" fiction. He loves to give esoteric details of trades and professions, "technical" or not, from that of a journalist in "The Man Who Would Be King" to an apothecary in "Wireless" to an engineer in "The Bridge Builders," which is otherwise a pure fantasy. Even in the delicate ghost story, "'They,'" we get a paragraph or two of abstruse detail about running a tenant farm. If there are no real technical details, he makes them up; "With the Night Mail" is one-third "infodump." Kipling himself called this sort of thing "that 'show of technical knowledge' for which I was blamed later" (Something of Myself, p. 49).
Fans of early science fiction and fantasy should take special notice of the novelette "The Brushwood Boy." It doesn't seem to be anthologized as often as his best-known stories, though it was popular enough to merit reprinting as a separate, prettily-illustrated book (1907) after being included in the collection The Day's Work (1898). It tells of a fine, upstanding young British officer, a credit to his school, his nation, and his class, who has recurring dreams about a mysterious country, or series of countries, with all the dreams beginning on a beach near a pile of brushwood. A particular point is made about his keeping "pure" through hard work, dedication to duty, a peculiar, perhaps even silly innocence (his own father greets news of his "purity" with "profane and incredulous laughs"), and perhaps through his tie to a young woman with dark hair who shares his dream adventures—as it turns out, in a very real way.
The story evokes beautifully, with a sure hand, the sense of wonder and mystery of dreams, especially in the naming of places by their qualities rather than with actual names (The Thirty-Mile Ride; The House of the Sick Thing; The City of Sleep; a lock with lilies called The Lily Lock) or simply by description: "the sea-road beyond the first lamp where the down is;" "the atlas country;" "the railway-station where the people ate among the roses." All this seems very true to experience, as the land of dreams, like the "wood where things have no names" in Through the Looking Glass, is a place without proper names; the part of the mind active there is not the part that makes and gives them.
This way of naming; the plot of a young man and woman who connect mentally in a dream world long before meeting one another; and the odd emphasis on the young man's purity and what it means to his love are three strong indications that this story partially inspired William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land (1912). What is, after all, the Night Land, the land of darkness, the land of sleeping reason where monsters dwell, other than the land of night and dream? Where else did Hodgson's way of naming salient features of the Night Land ("The Road Where the Silent Ones Walk"; "The Plain of Blue Fire") come from? If not from Kipling, then from dreams themselves. Perhaps the frightening "House of Silence" near "The Last Redoubt" is "The House of the Sick Thing" (while it may also be "The House on the Borderland," in its projection into the future). And purity in sexual love was of such importance to Hodgson, specifically in this work, that he devoted the book's long epigraph to the topic.
A couple of important and revealing points about Kipling's work are raised by Neil Gaiman in his brief and characteristically charming introduction. On one, I think he's wrong, or at least misleading, and on the other, exactly right. He says regarding Kipling's characters: "Kipling wrote about people, and his people feel very real. His tales of the fantastic are chilling, or illuminating or remarkable or sad, because his people breathe and dream. They were alive before the story started, and many of them live on once the last line has been read." This sounds as if his characterization was like that of, say, Henry James, or James Joyce, and as if characterization were central to his fiction. This is just how, for the most part, Kipling's characterization does not work. He generally gives his readers names and types, for instance, the middle- or upper-middle- or even upper-class Englishman in an administrative post in colonial India. He could depend on their familiarity and simply sketch an Everyman—or, in his case, an Everysubaltern—and trust that the audience would fill in the details.
Consider the main characters of "At the End of the Passage," four Englishmen with lonely posts in India's deadly hot season. At first it's a bit tricky to distinguish them; one has to say mentally: "Right, that one is the doctor; that one lives in the bungalow," etc. Yes, one is a bit more compassionate, one a bit more irascible, but they could be any Brits in this position—which is part of the point.
That the characterization is so brief and undeveloped and depends on the reader's prior knowledge can make some of Kipling's work a bit opaque to a modern reader in another culture—we do not have the detail, the "idiom," of these characters at our fingertips. George Orwell noted in his admirably clear-eyed essay on Kipling that, on reading Edmund Wilson's essay about Kipling in The Wound and the Bow, he "was struck by the number of things that are boringly familiar to us [a British audience] and seem to be barely intelligible to an American." ("Rudyard Kipling" [1942], The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 2: My Country Right or Left, 1940-1943, p. 191.)
Kipling's usual style of characterization is like that in what we now call "popular" fiction, and especially genre fiction, where the plot or the idea is key, not the characters. Characters serve the story, rather than the other way round. This is not the characterization of literary fiction, nor should it be. There's no point claiming for Kipling virtues—or, to use a less value-loaded term, characteristics—he is not trying for or even wants to avoid. His is not necessarily a lesser kind of writing—it's a different kind. Part of the reason for Kipling's ambiguous place in the literary canon—besides his racism, ethnocentrism, imperialism, militarism, jingoism—lies with the fact that he has written, and drawn characters, in a manner not only no longer available, for the most part, to "high literature," but which would nowadays serve precisely as a marker that we are reading popular fiction, though it was a manner once available to work considered serious literature. At the parting of the ways of literary and popular fiction, "high" and "low," it went with popular fiction.
But even a fan has to admit that, in the context of what now constitutes literature, a diet of Kipling stories, despite his mastery of the form, can leave one feeling a bit empty, in a way one doesn't after, say, Melville or James. His stories have a subtext in the sense that we can read out of them information about him, his world, and his views on that world. But in the other sense of subtext, his stories often mean less, other than what they explicitly say, than the work of almost any other author of his stature. However, literature wasn't always required to "mean" in that way, and even Kipling wasn't as limited as this makes him sound, especially in his later work.
It's interesting to note that attempts to reclaim something like Kipling's manner, in the self-conscious, pomo, pastiche-like "thrilling wonder tales" anthologies of recent years, mostly fail, as far as I have seen them, as highbrow attempts that don't quite "get it." The tone is off, the plot is off, the stories are too clever by half or are not entertaining enough and would never have sold to an editor when stories really had to make it on appeal to a general public. Kipling is one sort of the real thing of which those stories are pastiches.
Kipling's "opacity" (always a surprise in a writer who seems so straightforward and plain) also lies in his use of allusion without explanation. He was almost always, to some degree, a journalist, writing in a shorthand of contemporary references now sometimes difficult to decipher. He liked local color, and a sprinkling of foreign terms, slang terms, references to colonial outposts, native towns, colonial political and social affairs, gives his stories flavor. This was his practice in writing of India and again, later in his career, of South Africa. But given enough of these, a reader starts to lose grasp of the details.
In some cases, his allusions may even have left some of his contemporaries in the dark. How many would have known that the "egg" perceived by the blind woman in "'They'" meant that she was reading auras, and that she saw in the narrator, seemingly, the colors of his chakras, with discoloration where he was angry? (Kipling knew a lot about Theosophy, and his father knew Mme. Blavatsky.) Though one doesn't need the detailed knowledge to get a sense of the scene, which is often the case in his work, notes would be helpful. Unfortunately, this edition provides none. By contrast, the Oxford World Classics paperback of Life's Handicap, with only 27 stories, provides 28 pages of notes; and the Penguin edition of the two Jungle Books, less than half the length of this, 40 pages.
The other topic Gaiman takes up is Kipling's racism and imperialism. In response to having been told by fans that he shouldn't like his work because Kipling was "a fascist and a racist and a generally evil person," he says: "...Kipling's politics are not mine. But then, it would be a poor sort of world if one were only able to read authors who expressed points of view that one agreed with entirely.... Kipling was many things that I am not, and I like that in my authors." Orwell addresses the topic more directly and harshly: "Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting. It is better to start by admitting that, and then to try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly." He does state categorically that Kipling was no fascist (p. 184).
Kipling is not nearly the one-dimensional racist some might think, but it's understandable that some may be too offended by his opinions and usages to read him with any enjoyment or benefit. It's of course disturbing, in the midst of an evocative, romantic story like "The Brushwood Boy," to read:
"I'm very fond of Miriam."
"Sounds Jewish—Miriam."
"Jew! You'll be calling yourself a Jew next. She's one of the Herefordshire Lacys." (p. 406)
Or in the delicate, moving, "They": "I was silent reviewing that inexhaustible matter—the more than inherited (since it is also carefully taught) brutality of the Christian peoples, beside which the mere heathendom of the West Coast nigger is clear and restrained." (p. 479)
But it doesn't take much reading in Kipling or his period to see that his racism and anti-Semitism were commonplace for the time, nowhere near as nasty or virulent as that of some of his contemporaries, and were tempered by a sense of the innate value of other peoples and the faults of whites (as backhandedly expressed in the quote from "They"). His racism is not as mean-spirited as that of, say, Booth Tarkington (in his Penrod books), and he is outdone in his anti-Semitism by, for instance, the popular American comic writer, John Kendrick Bangs, still remembered in the SF and fantasy fields for some ghost stories and the humorous House Boat on the Styx (a partial inspiration for Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld books).
Kipling presents us with an opportunity to understand a man immersed in a culture now mostly foreign to us, to learn about the period and get a sense of what it was really like. His work shares the characteristic ability of popular writing to reveal contemporary thought in a way not fully available from possibly greater writers, writing with more of an eye on posterity, or even eternity. If one wants to learn the tenor, the feel, of a particular era, one does best to look at writing below the line of "high literature": popular fiction, humor, and pornography. Kipling is enough of his time to give us a flavor of his time.
To reject past work because it reflects the opinions of its time seems narrow and self-defeating, and it smacks of a kind of narcissism, an attempt to project one's own world-view—the only really enlightened, objective, and just world-view, after all—over people whom it cannot now benefit, as they are, in a word, dead. It would be more edifying to learn about the colonialist mentality of the period than to react to it with outrage and lose Kipling's work thereby. For those willing to make allowances for the beliefs and usages of another epoch, Kipling's stories bear great pleasures.
In short, Kipling, no matter his faults, is too good to lose, a sensitive observer, of wide interests, and a master storyteller. This generous book (at nearly 800 pages, it is almost too large, in the hand, to read comfortably) gives us—especially those with a particular interest in speculative fiction—an opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with his work.
But then, there are all those misprints.... Readers with a serious interest in Kipling would do better to look for copies of his individual collections. Others should note that there is available a fairly generous Portable Kipling and, it seems, separate collections of his fantasy and SF in both England and the US.
Bill Mingin, a graduate of Clarion West, has published seventeen short stories, with more forthcoming, and more than two hundred nonfiction pieces, including reviews in Publishers Weekly. He currently reviews audiobooks for AudioFile Magazine. He's married and lives in central New Jersey, where he runs a small book-export business.