Around Kipling's world:
It is this sensitivity to the radical foreignness of foreign places that makes his travel writing so compelling. He has a startling ability – generously represented in Andrew Lycett’s selection – to bring to life the colour and texture and, if need be, the perfume of wherever he found himself. The rubric “Traffics and Discoveries” is borrowed from Kipling’s 1904 collection of stories by that name (a title taken, in turn, from the seventeenth-century travel writer Richard Hakluyt) and it sums up the bustle and spectacle and surprise of the pieces collected here. One of the most remarkable features of Kipling’s prose is that he never reaches for off-the-peg tropes, having an almost Jacobean ability to yoke the familiar and the unfamiliar image together, whether he is depicting the frozen Canadian Pacific Railway in April (“the dumb white lips curl up to the track cut in the side of the mountain, and grin there fanged with gigantic icicles . . . . The snow has smothered the rivers, and the great looping trestles run over what might be a lather of suds in a huge wash-tub”) or the draught-board effect of a Japanese rice field.
Pro-British and pro-Empire down to his boot-straps, to quote Robert Menzies, Kipling was too good and too perceptive a writer not appreciate other cultures. He was not the rabid parochial nationalist of Leftist lore - could such a person have written Kim? - but a sophisticated cosmopolitan who was too wise to submit to the temptations of relativism. Britain was best, but there was much to learn from the rest of humanity.
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