Customer Reviews

The Light That Failed (Large Print Edition)

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is one of my personal favorites. I read it in high school just for personal pleasure. Kipling's knowledge of art is expressed nicely; he knows his stuff from his father. He expresses his time period honestly and touchingly. As a female of the twentieth century, I cannot understand everything that made Kipling write this novel. It is more than just the simple story of an artist going blind, of wars and art. It is, at heart, the story of two men living in their world of violence and social mores and beliefs, two men brothers in all but blood. I found moments in this novel very touching, all the more so because of the tenderness between Torp and Dickie. This is a novel about friendship mostly, and a very beautiful one at that.

After viewing the teleplay My Boy Jack which tells the story of Rudyard Kipling's son's short career in the British Army in World War I, I realized I had never read a book by Kipling, who is held in high regard in English literature. Not wanting to read one of his Jungle Book series, I thought this would be a good choice.

I sort of knew the story from having seen the film many years ago, but didn't remember a lot of details. The book was an okay reading experience but I was not blown away. This was Kipling's first novel, and critics note that its structure isn't perfect. The author has a way with describing things that makes them come alive. But the narrative was a bit clunky. It starts with the hero's childhood experience in a foster home (reminiscent of David Copperfield), then picks up with him as an adult in the Sudan during the conflicts there, then follows him to London and has long meandering chapters about his yearning for his childhood sweetheart -- who was sort of a twit in my opinion. Then it lurches into his blindness and its ramifications to an artist, and closes with a quick wrap up.

So, while Kipling's later books may be masterpieces of narration, this is perhaps not a shining example of what he became as a writer when he matured.

Rudyard Kipling was 24 when a shortened version of his first novel THE LIGHT THAT FAILED was published in a Philadelphia literary magazine. It included the "happy" ending that the monthly Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science had asked Kipling to send in, rather than his also requested alternative "unhappy" or "sad" ending. Undergoing various revisions until its publication as a book two months later in March 1891 and still later, THE LIGHT THAT FAILED had settled by 1892 into today's longer standard version enjoying Kipling's definitive personal imprimatur. It has 15 chapters and its ending is "sad".

The novel has depths, dimensions and slants galore: impossible to probe in a short review. Let me just dwell on one of those aspects: LIGHT.

A recurring Kipling focal point is simply light: light of many hues, at dawn and at dusk, on the sea and in the desert, as refracted by London fogs; how light is necessary to human life, how its reflections from human faces lead gifted observers like Sherlock Holmes to penetrate behind faces to souls; and, finally, what are light's enemies (not just darkness but gunpowder accidentally discharged by a girl into a boy's face at short range, drifting of that girl's hair in front of that boy's eyes, a saber cut on the grown boy's head in an 1885 Sudan battle, and the ruin that total blindness brings to the life of rising painter Dick Heldar, the +/- 25-year old hero of THE LIGHT THAT FAILED).

As early as Chapter Three we learn that "Dick's business in life was the study of faces" (Ch. 3). He used this ability cruelly to browbeat the sick unto dying head of the Syndicate that had published Heldar's wartime drawings during the 1885 Sudan campaign, and force the latter to return 247 sketches that the Syndicate had intended to keep. In Chapter One two young orphans who have only each other, Dick and Maisie, are about to part after four years together in a foster home. For Maisie's lawyers are sending her to France to study. She intends to become a painter. What about Dick? About himself he said to Maisie: "I don't seem to be able to pass any exams, but I can make awful caricatures of the masters. ... I'll be an artist, and I'll do things."

-- Later Dick receives a threatened press attack on his character as an artist by his good friend the Nilghai, corpulent master among war correspondents. Dick merely hints that he might retaliate by sending cartoon sketches of a naked Nilghai to the newspapers. His friend beats an immediate retreat.

-- A dejected Dick reads in her face Maisie's lack of reciprocal feeling for him.

-- On an evening walk along London's Thames Dick began a "study of the faces flocking past. Some had death written on their features, and Dick marveled that they could laugh" (Ch 4).

-- When he first lays eyes on starving Bessie Broke in his friend Torpenhow's neighboring flat, he sees in a flash that Bessie will make the perfect model for his planned master painting "Melancolia." He says: "Poor little wretch! Look at that face! There isn't an ounce of immorality in it. Only folly, -- slack, fatuous, feeble, futile folly" (Ch. 9).

Yes, given another ten years, Dick Heldar's hard earned mastery of light and line might have placed him among the immortals of painters, including the very different contemporary French Impressionists. But then something bad happened. Dick's light failed. Estimated by London's greatest oculist to have up to one year more of sight, nonetheless, within weeks of hard drinking while furiously painting, Dick Heldar went totally blind. Immediately, his angry model Bessie poured turpentine on Heldar's "Melancolia" and ruined it thoroughly with a knife.

To paint, Dick once told Maisie, you must first see something memorable, next remember it even better than when you saw it and finally paint your creative memory. But master paintings require light. And light, alas, can and does fail. There are few sights more pitiable than a blind painter of great talent. Read THE LIGHT THAT FAILED and probe the interactions of light, painter, darkness, blindness and despair.

-OOO-

Kipling proves his expertise as an author in this vivid description of a young, cocky sketch artist moving up the social ladder and the introspection he is forced to face when he can't have his childhood love. His professionalism in retelling the themes of independence vs dependence, decadence and self-doubt makes up for his sometimes annoying racist undertones and romantic depicting of the colonialistic era, which is just about the only reason for the missing fifth star.