I was raised on the Just So Stories and The Jungle Books and have maintained an interest in Kipling all my reading life and I’m impressed with what John Batchelor has done here. He manages to interweave some fascinating references to influences on the Stories and their influence on others with biographical detail which is pertinent to the writing of the Stories themselves. A good deal of the biography was familiar to me, but there is much here that wasn’t and I found it all interesting in this context.
Batchelor’s analysis is well-informed and fair, I think. For example, he deals with racism elsewhere in Kipling’s writing, but also contrasts it with How The Leopard Got His Spots in which Kipling is “fully in accord with the Ethiopian.” These contradictions are a feature of Kipling’s work and it is good to see them acknowledged and analysed. (He also points out the clever and rather subversive way in which Kipling uses the verse from Jeremiah, “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?” and the book is full of these insights.)
Many of the wonderful original illustrations from the book are reproduced here, along with other drawings by John Lockwood Kipling and photographs illustrating Kipling’s life. It is, quite rightly, rather scholarly in tone but it’s written in a very accessible way so, especially taken a couple of chapters at a time, I found it a rewarding read.
I think anyone who has ever read - or had read to them - the Just So Stories will enjoy this and get a great deal out of it. I can recommend it warmly.
(My thanks to Yale University Press for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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