The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling

David Gilmour is an excellent biographer, warm and sympathetic, appreciate of Kipling's genius, but makes no attempt to defend Kipling at his reactionary worst. Describes him correctly as a poet & a prophet, though he refused most official honours he was the unofficial poet of the British Empire, and his poems & short stories bring to life the experiences of the British army, adventurers and bureaucrats particularly in India. And of course his work for children, Just So Stories & Jungle Book, are wonderfully inventive and child friendly, Gilmour says one great pity of Kipling's life is that due to tragedy, he had no grandchildren, but he would have been a perfect grandfather.

I enjoyed this because it's the right length though a further forty pages could have been good it concentrates largely on one aspect of Kipling - the public man the paperback copy is clearly printed with adequately produced illustrations.It's downsides? Not the easiest prose style to read. Also, that as we move into the twentieth century, Kipling becomes largely a reactionary grump. I wonder if the author meant to give this impression as strongly as he did, and some extra text could have tempered this viewpoint.But this is a book to be recommended, without a doubt.

At a time when the "politically correct" holds sway in much of the media for intellectuals and all too much of academia, Rudyard Kipling is persona non grata -- the author of charming Victorian children's tales, but irredeemably tainted as an advocate and apologist for the British Empire and its subjugation of so many blacks and browns in the world. This biography of Kipling shows that the popular image de jour of Kipling is oversimplified and, at bottom, unfair and wrong.David Gilmour deliberately focuses on the "imperial" Kipling, or the political (as opposed to the literary) aspect of his life. Of course, it is impossible to cleave Kipling into two selves, one political and the other literary. No one can be so compartmentalized, but Kipling resists it more than most because he was so unabashedly a political writer. And Gilmour chooses to emphasize that fact by exploring Kipling's politics and his view of the British Empire, as well as his role in celebrating it and then mourning its imminent demise (Kipling died before World War II and the death throes of empire). As Gilmour puts it in his preface: "This is the first volume to chronicle Kipling's political life, his early role as apostle of the Empire, the embodiment of imperial aspiration, and his later one of the prophet of national decline."Gilmour achives his objective quite well. His Kipling -- as I believe is true of the actual Kipling -- was NOT a jingoistic rascist (although, to be sure, certain lines of his taken as they say out of context could be stretched and cited for the opposite conclusion). Yes, Kipling was a Victorian Englishman who grew up amidst, and believed in, the glory of the British Empire. But, as Gilmour persuasively writes, the empire Kipling touted and valued was a civilizing, even humanitarian, force -- an empire of "peace and justice, quinine and canals, railways and vaccinations". His model of empire had no place for the missionary zeal to transform all the Empire's subjects into brown or black (depending on their class) fish-and-chippers or public-school-educated Church-of-Englanders. Moreover, to Kipling, it was the altruistic responsibility of the wealthy, civilized haves of the world (principally Great Britain and the United States) to relieve suffering and improve the lot in life of the myriad have nots.Gilmour's biography shows, without explicit lecturing, that Kipling was not a stock "stiff-upper-lip" Victorian cardboard cut-out; he was human, with weaknesses he sought both to overcome and to mask, and with a strength of character that ultimately more than redeems him.Gilmour does not ignore, but he does not dwell on, the literary side of Kipling. For that, the reader must go elsewhere. But for a sensitive yet objective picture of "Kipling as a figurehead of his country and his age", I don't know where else one should or would care to look.

Best work to date on the life of Mr. Kipling. This is, in fact, the final word of this great man.

Excellent biography.