Customer Reviews

Stalky and Company

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Stalky and Co. is great fun. I have twice read these nine clever tales of three outrageous school boys - Stalky, M'Turk, and Beetle. Their ongoing battle of wits with masters (especially their nemesis, the sanctimonious Mr. King), fellow students, and the occasional school bully are immensely entertaining. Rudyard Kipling allegedly based these stories on his school years; to some degree Beetle was a self-portrait.

I had some initial difficulty with Kipling's schoolboy dialogue, but I did eventually become fluent in late nineteenth century British schoolboy slang. This fluency is critical to enjoying Kipling as the stories are comprised almost entirely of dialogue.

We quickly learn in the first story, In Ambush, that despite rules to the contrary, all right minded boys built huts in the furze hill behind the school, a place of retreat and meditation, where they smoked. Stalky, M'Turk, and Beetle were no exception. In this tale the three friends brilliantly outwit Mr. King, but they prove no match for the Headmaster, the final arbitrator and administer of justice.

Mr. King again underestimates the trio in the comical tale, An Unsavory Interlude. As Kipling unveils the convoluted, devious exploits of Stalky and friends, I wondered how they found time for Latin, mathematics, writing, and other studies. The answer is revealed in The Impressionists, another uneven match between the trio and a master, this time the overly conscientious Mr. Prout.

The tone of the last few stories - A Little Prep, The Flag of Their Country, and The Last Term - remained amusing, but they addressed more serious topics like bullying, sincere patriotism, and true courage. Kipling concludes with a visit with the schoolboys more than a decade later, now responsible men entrusted with managing and protecting the extensive British empire.

Stalky and Co. is as delightfully humorous today as it was a century ago. I am sure that you will enjoy meeting Stalky, M'Turk, and Beetle. Cheers.

Kipling appears to be freighted with controversey. That said, Stalky&Co. is one of those small masterpieces rarely read-more the pity. This wonderful, surprising, semi-autobiographical novel takes place within an English boys school, an institution primarily serving to push young officer candidates forward in their pre-military careers,cramming,inelegantly,for Sandhurst and the like. What sets this book apart from the entire genre is Kipling's extraordinary capacity to bring the three major characters, and the larger cast of minor players, teachers, staff, students, to a brilliant realization. But there is more: within these pages are some of the most uncanny perceptions of human behavior one can find, either within or without a pyschology text. Whatever one thinks of Kipling or the context within which he wrote, this slim volume is luminously lit both by the writer's indelible affection for his creations, and the profundity of what their experiences teach us all. If you swear a solemn oath to read only one single English Nineteenth Century Novel outside of the incomparable canon of Dickens, please, please, track down of copy of Stalky and Company, put aside all preconceptions, and for a too brief period of time, enter a rare, rare world.

This is barely a work of fiction. The stories of the three schoolboys, Stalky, M'Turk and Beetle, aren't all entirely complete and true, but the boys existed and so did the teachers and school. The schoolboy dialog is difficult at first. "Fag" still means short (like a "fag," a very short cigar or cigarette) but in the school it means the youngest boys of the lower form classes. Being "easy to draw" is a sharp criticism for "showing one's feelings too transparently." "Je vais gloater" is pseudo-French, meaning, "I'm going to gloat." Stalky and Company is full of lingo like this.

If you like pranks, you will laugh at this book and enjoy the story of increasing criminal competence developed by these three rascals.

If you think boys should be formed into serious and studious young men through studies and daily rigors on the playing field, on the other hand, you're going to hate this ruthless, unfunny, nightmarish book. This established argument about Stalky and Company has been going on for most of a century, and some of the praises and criticisms were contained over 40 years ago in "Kipling and the Critics," edited by Eliot Gilbert.

To Kipling's credit, not all the adventures are funny nor harmless. There are some serious messages, especially at the end. The careful reader will recieve an astonishing education, for the boys described were real, the school actually existed, and the graduates were prepared for "Sandhurst," the informal name for the town where the Royal Military Academy was and remains located. So it is a realistic story about boys prepared through secondary education to become officers of the British Empire at its historical high period.

If you enjoy this book and wonder what the real story was, it is still possible to get a copy of M'Turk's (Beresford's) actual autobiography about going to school with Kipling and Stalky (later General Dunsterville) in "School Days with Kipling," by Beresford. The sketch drawings of the boys and masters at the school described in "Stalky and Company" are thoroughly amusing, and a story of a play the boys put on for each other is a masterpiece of farce.

I first read this book in high school and loved it. I have read it at least once every two years since and have never gotten tired of it. It is hilarious - and also touching. The psycholical insights, which are not spelled out, but still clear, are excellent. I was very thankful to be able to get a Kindle edition; now I can carry it with me wherever I go.