Customer Reviews

Plain Tales From the Hills

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

 

 

I bought this book to recall the halcyon days of my secondary schooling in the years 1957 - 61. Then the book was an assigned text for all students in English in New Zealand. The language and the concepts were then frankly beyond the comprehension of 15 year olds. As I grew older, I became aware of the position Kipling held in the Late Victorian era, and the period following the end of the First World War.

I came to understand a little of what the British Empire meant in those times, and the great debt owed by the world to the British Army which subdued Iraq, Pakistan, and the Indian Continent for almost 200 years.

Without the benefit of the bomb, with a tiny armed service, and a desire to provide fair and equitable government, the Raj governed fearlessly through the efforts of the thirds sons of many of the great English Families, while the fourth sons provided the humanity of the Church. Patterns we could well emulate again today!

This was bread and butter to Kipling. In his early years as a huge supporter of the system, as a spiritualist after the death of his son in the First World War, and in his later years as the designer of the huge Military Cemetaries established in France and Belgium after the War to the Empire's dead, he truly became in his own words a "Builder of the Silent Cities".

In 2006, the concepts of his writings are remote from many. In terms of the trials of people, and their attempts to rise over their circumstances through a sense of duty and moral propriety, Kipling's works are without peer. For those starting out to discover him, start with "Stalky and Company", and move to this book, and his other works as extended learning. I hope you come to love his simple characters as I have, and that your School System, and its weird sense of Boyhood Literature does not destroy the desire to read Kipling until your late 60's

This book has brought great joy to someone in the prime of life, and brings back some important memories of Scouts, Church and Honour in a time when these are so sadly lacking.

My copy has 36 stories, but Kipling's Plain Tales tells about life in British-occupied India from every imaginable angle. It's touching, it's funny, and at times it's unbelievably sad. Don't let the author put you off, this is a highly readable book. My personal favorites are "Thrown Away" and "Beyond the Pale", but be careful; they're sad.

Rudyard Kipling writes concisely and with great insight on a wide range of issues. With each story only taking up a few pages the depth of characterisation is superb. 'The gate of one-hundred sorrows' is one of the finest short stories ever written.

Here we have a compendium of forty-two brief (3-8 pages each) tales of Colonial life, and originally targeted for those already familiar with an existence in India. Most of these charming stories were originally published in the Lahore "Civil and Military Gazette" (1888) but Kipling subsequently revised the tales (1890, as "Plain Tales from the Hills"), injecting them with more of the details and flavours of India so that the folks back in England could cognitively read of the Empire in the East.

Featured are highlights of the lives of the British soldiers in late 19th-Century (Colonial) India as well as those of their wives, lovers, Indian associates, and even their horses. Kipling punctuates levity and outrageous behavior with sorrow and humility. He knew quite truly that one cannot cast shadows without light.

Kipling's writings are much akin to tales scribed by eastern European and Middle-Eastern Arab and Persian authors: ergo, he told each of his stories as the details entered his head with an eye to the journey rather than to the destination. Here you will find an odd mesh of the subtle wit of Anatole France ( A Mummer's Tale / The Red Lily (The Irresistible Stories of Anatole France series, Vol. 6) ) meshed with a Dostoyevsky-ish slant on man's dark side (The Brothers Karamazov.) These encounters are all quite savory and gratifying to the avid reader of classic literature.

Various critics have remarked on Kipling's insensitivity toward foreign cultures but, given that he wrote these tales more than 100 years ago, I see this commentary as a revisionist posture -- Kipling's views on ethnicity were shared by most of the English peoples of his era.

I should also mention that the insightful and informative introduction written in the Penguin softcover edition by David Trotter prepares one to great advantage in digesting Kipling.

Highly recommended.

The stories are wonderful. I've read a decent amount of Kipling and am always pleased to find more of them. This particular collection contains a bunch of really charming tales that range from funny through tragic. These types of short stories remind me why I love Kipling so much. As with all Kipling, it's worth noting that he was a product of his time and some of his writing could be considered offensive to the modern reader.

This particular Kindle version is quite good with proper formatting and few if any typos. My only complaint (and only reason that this lacks a full 5 stars) is the lack of hyper-links in the Table of Contents. This makes it very difficult to jump to specific short stories.

I don't agree with the racist aspects of the book. However, when one considers the era in which the book was written, such views were commonplace and give us insight into colonial India.

I believe Kipling was wildly popular in his day. This collection of stories about English life in India may have entranced the masses and sold a lot of newspapers in the first decade of the 20th century, but in the context of almost exactly a hundred years later, they have lost most of their shine. While Kipling might have been the foremost raconteur of British India, compared to great short story writers like Chekhov, de Maupassant, or Twain, he comes across today as coy and contrived. Certain phrases make their appearance in far too many of the tales, for example: "Once there was a....but that's another story." Cute kids, the wisdom of animals, the wiles of the fair sex, the unfathomable nature of "natives", gruff officers, perfect ladies, the one-dimensional earthiness of the common soldier---these are stories filled with stereotypes. Kipling's stories may hold your interest for a short time and you can wonder at the change in taste that has occurred between 1907, when he published these, and today. In many tales, Kipling depicts the lifestyle among the higher echelons of the British Raj, but only through a veil of irony or humor. A regular topic is the struggle for social status among the British; efforts to short circuit the pecking order and reversals suffered thereby. People marrying "beneath them" or trying to marry "above them" are often found here. Though people still refer to Kipling as "a writer about India", it is still true that he wrote about his compatriots, not about India. The two or three tales with Indian characters who are anything other than servants lack any depth. Even the pathos-filled "Story of Muhammad Din", which shows understanding, ultimately deals with illness as something inevitable in India---there are no questions as to why death comes to small children so frequently. Overall, Kipling provides a certain local color to British literature of the late 19th and early 20th century, but cannot be regarded as a great British writer on the level of Maugham, Conrad, Lawrence, Forster or Greene because he lacks broader humanity, deep thought, and universal vision.

A fine collection of extremely well-crafted stories.
But these pages are crammed with racism, with remarks on the worthlessness of a native indian's life, their stupidity and their weakness.
One of the stories starts with "we are a high-caste and enlightened race", any man who shows interest in the ways of life of the natives is ridiculed over pages and the only remark on the death of a native child is: "They have no stamina, these brats."
Well written, but disgusting.