The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories
Written by Rudyard Kipling
Narrated by Rebecca Burns
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
Written when he was only twenty-two years old, the tale also features some of Kipling's most crystalline prose and one of the most beautifully rendered, spectacularly exotic settings he ever used. Best of all, it features two of his most unforgettable characters: the ultra-vivid Cockneys Peachy Carnahan and Daniel Dravot, who impart to the story its ultimate, astonishing twist.
Also included in this collection are "Wee Willie Winkie," "The Drums of the Fore and Aft," "Mary Postgate," and "The Maltese Cat."
Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling was born in India in 1865. After intermittently moving between India and England during his early life, he settled in the latter in 1889, published his novel The Light That Failed in 1891 and married Caroline (Carrie) Balestier the following year. They returned to her home in Brattleboro, Vermont, where Kipling wrote both The Jungle Book and its sequel, as well as Captains Courageous. He continued to write prolifically and was the first Englishman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907 but his later years were darkened by the death of his son John at the Battle of Loos in 1915. He died in 1936.
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Reviews for The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories
52 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Not having visited a newsroom yet myself, I don’t know how accurate Kipling’s description of the Bombay Mail at the opening of The Man who would be King is, but it’s exactly how I’ve always imagined, understandable given the author was working as a journalist in India when writing these stories. Evocatively expressed between semi-colons, this is a disorganised chaos of humanity working against the odds in a barely comfortable, stiflingly humid atmosphere, to produce a coherent message or at the very least fill a newspaper's columns with informative content from some mostly reputable sources. Kipling’s style is an acquired taste, as messy but flavoursome as the cuisine of the country he’s evoking, only really gaining momentum in those stories with a vivid, psychologically challenging idea like The Haunted Rickshaw or At Twenty-Two, in which a mining disaster inspired by Emile Zola’s Germinal is transposed to Kipling's country of origin.
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- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This fantastic short tale is narrated by an Indian journalist in 19th century India who meets two British adventurers, Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan. Intrigued by their stories, he agrees to help them in a minor errand, but later he regrets this and informs the authorities about them—preventing them from blackmailing a minor rajah. A few months later they reappear at his newspaper office in Lahore, telling him of a plan they have hatched. After years of trying their hands at all manner of things, they have decided that "India is not big enough for them". They plan to go to Kafiristan and set themselves up as kings. Dravot will pass as a native and, armed with twenty rifles, they plan to find a king or chief to help him defeat enemies. Once that is done, they will take over for themselves. They ask the narrator for the use of reference books and maps of the area—as a favor, because they are fellow Freemasons, and because he spoiled their blackmail scheme. They also show him a contract they have made between themselves which swears loyalty between the pair and total abstinence from women and alcohol (that last part is hardly believable).Two years later, on a scorching hot summer night, Carnehan returns to the narrator's office, a broken man, a crippled beggar clad in rags, but he tells an amazing story. He and Dravot had succeeded in becoming kings: traversing treacherous mountains, finding the Kafirs, mustering an army, taking over villages, and dreaming of building a unified nation and even an empire. The Kafirs (pagans, not Muslims) were impressed by the rifles and Dravot's lack of fear of their idols, and acclaimed him as a god, the reincarnation of Alexander the Great. They show a whiter complexion than others of the area ("so hairy and white and fair it was just shaking hands with old friends") implying their ancient lineage to Alexander himself. The Kafirs practiced a form of Masonic ritual, and Dravot's reputation was further enhanced when he showed knowledge of Masonic secrets that only the oldest priest remembered.Their schemes were foiled, however, when Dravot (against the advice of Carnehan) decided to marry a Kafir girl. Kingship going to his head, he decided he needed a Queen and then royal children. Terrified at marrying a god, the girl bit Dravot when he tried to kiss her during the wedding ceremony. Seeing him bleed, the priests cried you're "Neither God nor Devil but a man!" Most of the Kafirs turned against Dravot and Carnehan. A few of his men remained loyal, but the army defected and the two kings were captured.For the denouement of this fantastic tale you must read the story yourself, just don't expect a happy ending.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5So I'd never read Kipling, sue me. The Man Who Would be King is one of my fav movies, and I really enjoyed the story, it told the same story, and actually it made me like the movie more, for I could then see that the added bits (it is a short story after all, you have to add something) were done very well in keeping the tone of the original story.The other short stories in the collection, well I read a few, and I still don't like short stories. They are the fast food of literature. You can fill up your time with them, but you don't really take anything away from it.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5It's a difficult book for me. I did't - couldn't - read all the short stories here. They are too subtle and written in too complex a language. But what I did read, I did experience an unique writing style worth savouring.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Oxford World's Classic edition 1999This is a collection of 17 early stories by Rudyard Kipling, most of them written in 1888 while working at his first job as a journalist for an Indian weekly paper. It was these stories that first announced Kiplings arrival to the world and made him famous in England. The Oxford collection puts them in chronological order so one can watch as he matures and experiments with creating a narrative voice. The common thread is entrapment in a bad place, starting with the first story about being caught in a sand pit, to the more subtle but powerful stories about emotional entrapment's in bad relationships, and even colonial entrapment, the last title story, "The Man Who Would Be King", is among his most famous. The autobiographical story "Baa Baa, Black Sheep", which describes Kipling's own entrapment between the ages of 5 and 10 in a Dickens-like home for wayward children, is sort of the climax of the book bringing the rest together. It's interesting to see the psychological origin of Kipling's anti-colonialism, his personal quest for freedom from oppression mirrored the struggles of his adopted country.Considering there were 17 stories, surprisingly there were only 6 that I would want to re-read again, and of those only three stood out as the best: "The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes", "Baa Baa, Black Sheep" and "The Man Who Would Be King". Two stories are notable for their Mark Twain like ability to speak in the local language and manner of the native Indian: "Gemini" and "At Flood Time" and lastly the story "Twenty-Two" is a Zola tribute to Germinal - since its one of my favorite novels and authors I was pleased to come upon it here.Probably the best thing about reading these stories, most of them now somewhat obscure, is to discover Kipling in the same way others did. He was only 23 when he wrote most of them and his energy and optimism shine through leaving one wanting to see what he comes up with next.