Review by Edward Tanguay October 3, 1997

One of first aspects that I realized in this book is that the Hollywood version of Mowgli and his merry adventures which I had seen as a kid was pretty watered down.  In this book version, you get the deep, dark secrets of the jungle.  It is a world laid open, not really a nice world, but a world in which animals kill and eat each other, a very natural world with all its carnal implications. In part, this is due to Kipling's powerful writing. His voice seems to be coming from a another source (didn't he say in the introduction that he felt that his pen was guided when he wrote these stories?).  Rudyard didn't write these stories from an outline, they poured out of him. For this reason, I liked that they are simply stories in and of themselves and not brought together into a novel or with a frame story. Although many of the stories have Mowgli and many of the other characters in them, they each have their own true kernel and Kipling wrote now more than to express the spirit of each.    His stories seem to be born, not made--they each have a life of their own.   Nice. The Jungle books are very odd works.  They are an expression of a powerful myth.

A continuing theme is that of growing up, taking on challenges (Rikki-tikki-tavi), self-discovery and the realisation that a new life has begun.  Rikki-Tikki-Tavi was one of the best of the stories.  Kipling is a master of telling matter-of-fact stories. Again it is a children's story but fierce in a strangely serious way. For instance the theme that Rikki hates Nag so much that he needs to not only kills the Nag, but also his wife, and he needs to destroy all the eggs so that they are exterminated from the area. Maybe I was raised on more politically correct children's books, but this just seems a bit powerful for a bed-time story.  Yet the story grips you in a very natural way and seems to "play on your deep strings." Something like the book Lord of the Flies. The killing in these stories is not a cartoon killing, but a very natural and necessary killing.

Quiquern reminded me of The Call of the Wild, first of all in its setting and second in its view point of the harsh world form an animal's point of view. The pounding of the elephants in "Toomai of the Elephants" is a scene you never forget. You are fully in the jungle, in the trance of the elephants ritual.  It is dark and cultish.

The songs at the end of the stories were nice.

In "Her Majesty's Servants" in which you get a view of the world form the point of view of pack animals and other animals that work for humans, Kipling gives you another view of the caste system.   Kipling is able to put even slapstick comedy in the mouths of animals without making it a melodrama. The animals retain their world and their seriousness.

"See here, you son of an imported Malaga jackass," he said between his teeth, "I'd have you know that I'm related on my mother's side to Carbine, winner of the Melbourne Cup; and where I come from we aren't accustomed to being ridden over roughshod by any parrot-mouthed, pig-headed mule in a pop-gun pea-shooter battery."

Interestingly Mowgli's eyes are symbol of domination.  It is with his eyes (with his human consciousness?) that he has an extra magical power over the beasts much stronger than him.

I savored the many scenes and moods that Kipling created in this book:

From "How Fear Came" describing Mowgli during the drought:

It was here that Mowgli came nightly for the cool and the companionship.  The most hungry of his enemies would hardly have cared for the boy then.  His naked hide made him seem more lean and wretched than any of his fellows.  His hair was bleached to tow colour by the sun; his ribs stood out like the ribs of a basket, and the lumps on his knees and elbows, where he used to track on all fours, gave his shrunken limbs the look of knotted grass-stems.

From "The Miracle of Purun Bhagat" describing the peacefulness of Kali's Schrine:

Then came such summer rains as had not been known in the Hills for many seasons.  Through three good months the valley was wrapped in cloud and soaking mist--steady, unrelenting downfall, breaking off into thunder-shower after thunder-shower.  Kali's Shrine stood above the clouds, for the most part, and there was a whole month in which the Bhagat never caught a glimpse of his village.  It was packed away under a white floor of cloud that swayed and shifted and rolled on itself and bulged upward, but never broke from its piers--the streaming flanks of the valley.

From "Letting in the Jungle" describing the distinct flash of sunlight on a gun of a pursuer:

"Buldeo!" said Mowgli, sitting down. "He follows our trail, and yonder is the sunlight on his gun. Look!"
It was no more than a splash of sunlight, for a fraction of a second, on the brass champs of the old Tower musket, but nothing in the Jungle winks with just that flash, except when the clouds race over the sky.  Then a piece of mica, or a little pool, or even a highly-polished leaf will flash like a heliograph.  But that day was cloudless and still.

"Letting in the Jungle" was one of my favorite stories because it is one of revenge of the (natural and good) animals on (corrupt) man. Little by little the jungle is "let in" to the town, until:

Then they fled, houseless and foodless, down the valley, as their village, shredded and tossed and trampled, melted behind them. A month later the place was a dimpled mound, covered with soft, green young stuff; and by the end of the Rains there was the roaring Jungle in full blast on the spot that had been under plough not six months before. 

From "Quiquern":

The underfed dogs snapped and growled in the passages, glaring at the cold stars, and snuffing into the bitter wind, night after night.  When they stopped howling the silence fell down again as solid and as heavy as a snowdrift against a door, and men could hear the beating of their blood in the thin passages of the ear, and the thumping of their own hearts, that sounded as loud as the noise of sorcerers' drums beaten across the snow.

From "The Spring Running," how you can tell it is spring in the jungle:

There is one day when all things are tired, and the very smells, as they drift on the heavy air, are old and used.  One cannot explain this, but it feels so.  Then there is another day--to the eye nothing whatever has changed--when all the smells are new and delightful, and the whiskers of the Jungle People quiver to their roots, and the winter hair comes away from their sides in long, draggled locks.  Then, perhaps, a little rain falls, and all the trees and the bushes and the bamboos and the mosses and the juicy-leaved plants wake with a noise of growing that you can almost hear, and under this noise runs, day and night, a deep hum.   That is the noise of the spring--a vibrating boom which is neither bees, nor falling water, nor the wind in tree-tops, but the purring of the warm, happy world.

Kipling has an impressive control of his language.  His descriptions make the book juicy and colorful and fun to read:

. . . he scratched himself, yawned, and spread out his paws one after the other to get rid of the sleepy feeling in their tips.

. . .Man is the weakest and most defenceless of all living things, and it is unsportsmanlike to touch him.  They say too--and it is true--that man-eaters become mangy, and lose their teeth.

A black shadow dropped down into the circle.  It was Bagheera the Black Panther, inky black all over, but with the panther markings showing up in certain lights like the pattern of watered silk.  Everybody knew Bagheera, and nobody cared to cross his path; for he was as cunning as Tabaqui, as bold as teh wild buffalo, and as reckless as the wounded elephant. But he had a voice as soft was wild honey dripping from a tree, and a skin softer than down.

What Kaa did not know about the Middle Jungle, as they call it,--the life that runs close to the earth or under it, the bould, burrow, and the tree-bole life,--might have been written upon the smallest of his scales.

Kaa's diamon-shaped head cut the pool like a razor, and came out to rest on Mowgli's shoulder.

All the jungle was his friend, and just a little afraid of him.

In this book, Kipling celebrates animals. He gives us a world of animals in their native jungle, he shows us the jungle from the animal's point of view and also man from the animal's point of view.  It is not a silly world nor a cartoony world.  It is a realm of real animals given life through Kiplings gift of story telling.  Through his writing you understand what it means to wish: "Good hunting!"

Edward Tanguay

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