Friday, August 2, 2019

Kipling, again

The first selection in "Five Best: H.S. Cross on Novels About Boarding School" is a Kipling I haven't read:
Stalky & Co.
By Rudyard Kipling (1899)

Each chapter of “Stalky & Co.” narrates a discrete episode in the adventures of Stalky, McTurk and Beetle. The three friends attend “the ‘Coll,’ ” a fictionalized version of Rudyard Kipling’s own boarding school, and have no use for school spirit, prefects, athletics or any ideals the school story was designed to promote. Instead the trio values cleverness, humor, poetic justice and loyalty. No one understands irony quite like Kipling, and mixed with young Stalky’s meticulous revenge schemes, the tone is hard to resist. When a master kicks the three out of their study, Stalky engineers the destruction of the master’s study: He shoots rocks at a drunk school servant, who imagines he is being harassed by the master himself; the servant retaliates, hurling rocks into the study and causing the master to use “strange words, every one of which Beetle treasured.” The Victorian-school story never recovered from its savaging by Kipling’s pen, and no later work has approached it in humor, descriptive beauty and unsentimental characterizations.
Stalky & Co. at Gutenberg.

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