Stalky & Co.

Rudyard Kipling (1865 to 1936) is known as the author of The Jungle Book, Kim and many poems and tales of the British Empire, and in 1907 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Stalky and Co., published in 1899, is a different kind of book: a collection of linked stories set at a boarding school, drawn from his own experience as a pupil at the United Services College in the seaside town of Westward Ho!, a place unusual both for its exclamation mark and for being named after a novel by Charles Kingsley.

The tone is irreverent. The heroes are not model pupils but boys who think for themselves and who treat school rules as a challenge to their wits. Kipling writes with delight about their pranks and with obvious understanding of the loyalties that form among schoolboys. Yet there is also a hard edge: the stories do not shy away from cruelty, and they raise questions about discipline, authority and the education of future officers.

The recording is divided into ten parts, the first of them an opening poem, and lasts about six and a half hours. It is read by a LibriVox volunteer and will reward anyone who enjoys Kipling's vigorous style, his ear for dialogue and his sharp sense of humor. Readers of Tom Brown's School Days will find this a bracing change of flavor, more rough than polite. The stories also offer a view of late Victorian England and of the values it hoped to pass on to its sons. They can be heard in any order, since each episode has its own plot, and the shared characters make the volume feel like a single, lively world.