By contrast with the Prague writer, Kipling's narrative genius did not consist in making up characters whole cloth from a vivid imagination. The ploy saved the besieged.Rudyard Kipling was no Franz Kafka. This was the same carving on a chest after tribesmen had killed Stalky's deputy officer. While out on a solitary patrol, Stalky employs on a hostile corpse a form of mutilation characteristic of the other tribe. He is besieged by two tribes that normally hate one another. *** In a reunion of Old Boys 15 years after graduation, the tale is told of Stalky leading his beloved Sikhs out on the northwest frontier of the Indian Raj. Ostensibly this going off campus violates school rules and a house master trespasses in pursuit of them and is punished by the landowner for his sins. Thus M'Turk makes friends with a local Irish landowner and receives permission to wander on his estate.

If wronged, the three will find an appropriate punishment to fit the crime. *** A constant theme of STALKY & CO is revenge. Nor are the three entirely approved of by their fellow students. *** The three boys are indulged and their good qualities much appreciated by the Head and by the school's congenial Chaplain, while thoroughly disapproved of by the four rigorously traditional Housemasters. We readers are shown them as deliberate 'outsiders' who go their own way (within limits prescribed by loyalty to the school and to the school's beloved Head - in real life an old school chum of Kipling's family). ***The three boys are all destined for eccentric greatness when they grow up. Most of them were being prepared to become Subalterns in the army. *** United Services College was an almost brand new prep school whose students were mainly born abroad of parents serving Queen Victoria's Empire, especially in India and Burma. We focus on Stalky, M'Turk and Beetle in their last two years of school, when they are 15 and 16 years old. Down the years Kipling would write more of their adventures.

*** STALKY & CO (1899) is a hugely successful fictional re-creation of Rudyard Kipling's half dozen years as a boarder at the United Services College on the seacoast of North Devon at Westward Ho! In the novel, Kipling is 'Beetle,' a disheveled, near-sighted poet, editor of the school newspaper, one of three inseparables which includes Irish aristocrat M'Turk and team leader Stalky. Academic and literary careers have been built on tracing Kipling's 'originals.' One way to look at Kipling's fiction: there is always a lot more Rudyard in it than you might suspect. Kipling's men and boys in KIM, THE JUNGLE BOOKS, MULVANEY STORIES and other narratives were based on living three-dimensional people whom he had met, interacted with or whose real-life stories others had told him.

Stalky & Co. by Rudyard Kipling