The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life Of Rudyard Kipling

David Gilmour

Editions

Review

I read this book more because I admire David Gilmour than from a prior interest in Kipling.  His life of Lampedusa, The Last Leopard pbk £12.99, ranks among the very best literary biographies, and his Curzon is likewise an extraordinary achievement.  The scale of this book appears to be narrower, since this is not a thorough biography but rather a political biography of the man, but since its author is Gilmour it must be assumed that he has a wider purpose.

What drives it is the often bizarre contradictions, which Gilmour neither ducks nor over-analyses, thereby allowing humanity to Kipling without foisting mysterious historical or psychological theories on him.  Kipling was shaped by the Empire and helped to shape it: identifying himself early as a champion of Empire, he then spent most of his life gloomily predicting its collapse.  Although knowledgeable about the cultures of the Empire’s subject peoples and sympathetic to them, he apparently believed in the divine right of the British to govern them.  And though regarded (correctly) as a champion of the common man (“Tommy Atkins”), he was a savage critic of democracy.  In many ways he comes across as a foul, repellent man, both in his views and his manner of expressing them, for he was quick to criticise and, of course, brilliantly articulate.  And – which is the factor that obliges one to pay attention – he was so often proved right.

While never losing sight of the writer, Gilmour manages to show, in constantly witty and elegant prose, more about the decline of Britain’s Empire through the person of Kipling than I have learned from any other book.  This is a brilliant biographical study, and a marvellously illuminating prism through which to view an epoch. - review by Johnny de Falbe

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