‘Stalky and Co’ by Rudyard Kipling is a series of short stories set in a Devon public school. One of the school boy characters is given the run of the headteacher’s library and he exults because he finds himself able to read such authors as Ruskin and Byron.
Following the chronology of Kipling’s own youth, this largess would refer to a time in the early 1880s.
Given the copyright laws I feel the same sort of ‘freedom’ when I visit the libraries of free e-books that exist on the internet. All the books that Beetle might have read are now available in electronic form; even the contemporary literary works at that time are now to be found somewhere on line free, gratis and for nothing!
Modern books by contemporary authors have to be paid for (not unreasonably) but classic literature in English is almost inexhaustible and offers some odd ‘treasures.’ One of which I read this morning after an uneasy night and very early rising.
‘The Explorer’ (1908) is a novel by Somerset Maugham which I discovered while trying to find some of his short stories to add to my e-book reader. It was not a novel of which I had heard previously, but I enjoy Maugham’s style and find it hard to resist, so added it to my electronic collection with alacrity.
It is an extraordinary novel which concerns the life of a family of ancient name ruined by the feckless behaviour of a father who mortgages his estate and eventually ends up in prison for fraud. His two children are forced to exist on the charity of relatives until the final crisis blows apart their lives.
The story is not remarkable for the clichéd nature of the basic narrative but the cast of characters seems to have been culled from various other writers. The witty, urbane and epigrammatic Dick Lomas seems to have wandered out of some comedy of manners by Oscar Wilde and Mrs Crowley’s musing question about him, “I wonder why you never married,” seems almost laughable after all the camp playfulness that Lomas has exhibited!
Alexander MacKenzie, Dick Lomas’s dearest friend, is his opposite. Alex is “tanned by exposure to tropical suns” and has a manner “which suggested that he was used to command.” He is, of course, “spare and well-made” with “limbs well-knit” and when he looked at you he “looked straight at you with a deliberate steadiness.” He is able to make, what to modern ears are incredible statements about Africa, colonialism and the right of Britain to spread its power – he seems more at home in a novel by Rider Haggard!
The language is a delight and one can hardly restrain a giggle when the superficially attractive yet ‘rotten to the core’ worthless George says, “It’s awfully ripping of you to take pity on me” when our stalwart hero offers to take him to Africa to join with him in trying to stem the ‘beastly’ Arab slavers from their human traffic and gain more territory for the British crown.
This may be a pot-boiler of a novel, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, right up to the ‘happy’ ending when our indestructible hero is about to set off the Congo (!) but the little lady will wait for him to return.
Awwww! They don’t write them like this any more!
Following the chronology of Kipling’s own youth, this largess would refer to a time in the early 1880s.
Given the copyright laws I feel the same sort of ‘freedom’ when I visit the libraries of free e-books that exist on the internet. All the books that Beetle might have read are now available in electronic form; even the contemporary literary works at that time are now to be found somewhere on line free, gratis and for nothing!Modern books by contemporary authors have to be paid for (not unreasonably) but classic literature in English is almost inexhaustible and offers some odd ‘treasures.’ One of which I read this morning after an uneasy night and very early rising.
‘The Explorer’ (1908) is a novel by Somerset Maugham which I discovered while trying to find some of his short stories to add to my e-book reader. It was not a novel of which I had heard previously, but I enjoy Maugham’s style and find it hard to resist, so added it to my electronic collection with alacrity.
It is an extraordinary novel which concerns the life of a family of ancient name ruined by the feckless behaviour of a father who mortgages his estate and eventually ends up in prison for fraud. His two children are forced to exist on the charity of relatives until the final crisis blows apart their lives.
The story is not remarkable for the clichéd nature of the basic narrative but the cast of characters seems to have been culled from various other writers. The witty, urbane and epigrammatic Dick Lomas seems to have wandered out of some comedy of manners by Oscar Wilde and Mrs Crowley’s musing question about him, “I wonder why you never married,” seems almost laughable after all the camp playfulness that Lomas has exhibited!
Alexander MacKenzie, Dick Lomas’s dearest friend, is his opposite. Alex is “tanned by exposure to tropical suns” and has a manner “which suggested that he was used to command.” He is, of course, “spare and well-made” with “limbs well-knit” and when he looked at you he “looked straight at you with a deliberate steadiness.” He is able to make, what to modern ears are incredible statements about Africa, colonialism and the right of Britain to spread its power – he seems more at home in a novel by Rider Haggard!
The language is a delight and one can hardly restrain a giggle when the superficially attractive yet ‘rotten to the core’ worthless George says, “It’s awfully ripping of you to take pity on me” when our stalwart hero offers to take him to Africa to join with him in trying to stem the ‘beastly’ Arab slavers from their human traffic and gain more territory for the British crown.
This may be a pot-boiler of a novel, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, right up to the ‘happy’ ending when our indestructible hero is about to set off the Congo (!) but the little lady will wait for him to return.
Awwww! They don’t write them like this any more!
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