Kipling's warnings in the wilderness

Though David Gilmour's book has the form of a biography, it does not concern itself with Kipling's private and emotional life, nor yet with the progress of his art. It is, rather, a study of his public role and political life, in which the twin strands of imperialism and conservatism are closely intertwined. This is a topic around which previous biographers have trodden gingerly, perhaps for fear of what they might find. In The Long Recessional, however, Gilmour confronts it head-on: the result is a convincing and absorbing account of the peripeteias and contradictions of Kipling's political utterances - his views were based on feeling, rather than on any philosophy - set against the historical events to which they were a reaction.

At the beginning of his literary career, as a journalist in Lahore and Allahabad, Kipling wrote of Anglo-Indian adulteries in Simla, of native Indian life, and of the other ranks in the British Army. It was not until he left India in 1889 that the imperial message began to sound clearly in his work.

The officers of the Indian Civil Service, often derided in the early stories, are now seen as selflessly devoted to their work, sacrificing themselves for the good of the native inhabitants. "I believe there has been no civilising experiment in the world's history, at all comparable to British rule in India," he wrote in 1896. These administrators had taken up "the White Man's burden" - a phrase he coined in a poem addressed to the United States, urging it, too, to become an imperial power.

Back in England, he was appalled by the ignorance of imperial issues, and resolved to tell the English of "the whole sweep and meaning of things and effort and origins throughout the Empire". "And what should they know of England who only England know?" he wrote.

By 1899, when, towards the end of the Jubilee celebrations, he published Recessional, which had an astounding impact on the public, he had become the "Laureate of the Empire" and a national prophet. But, after the Boer War and the advent of a Liberal Government in 1906, his role changed: in Gilmour's words, he became "Cassandra, condemned to utter prophecies that no one would heed". He hated Lloyd George, described as a "Welsh thief" for his taxation proposals, hated Churchill, "a political prostitute", who, at the coronation of George V, looked, he wrote, "like an obscene paper-backed French novel in the Bodleian".

Over the next years he attacked, viciously and savagely, democracy, trade unions, socialism and the women's suffrage movement, and prophesied disaster for the government's policies in Ireland, India and South Africa. The immense losses during the first months of the First World War led him to castigate the "wantonness" of the politicians, who, despite his warnings of the German threat, had been unprepared for Armageddon, making it "necessary to throw up a barricade of the dead bodies of the nation's youth behind which the most elementary precautions could be begun".

Despite his reactionary excesses and the intemperate language in which they were expressed, only too often his gloomy prophecies would be proved correct: he was right in warning that our treatment of the Boers would lead to apartheid, right in warning of the danger posed by Hitler, right in warning of a Hindu-Muslim strife if the British withdrew from India.

All this is excellent. David Gilmour's analysis is insightful; he is, too, scrupulously fair to the author. While not condoning the frequent lapses into vulgarity and childish abuse, he unhesitatingly acquits Kipling of racism and anti-Semitism - accusations often levelled against him. Gilmour naturally relies much on Kipling's work - both the poems and the prose - for his evidence, and here, however, doubts begin to creep in.

The crass view that "The Man who would be King" is an "allegory of imperialism" is admittedly not Gilmour's, but he endorses it; he misreads Recessional - it is not about imperial decline - despite quoting Kipling himself - "Don't gas but be ready to give people snuff" - on its meaning.

His sympathy for Kipling as imperialist appears not to extend to Kipling as writer, where his preferred method of criticism is brusque dismissal. Captains Courageous is a failure; Kipling wrote no good stories about the Navy (a very debatable proposition), nor about the Boer War - an assertion which would surprise Craig Raine, who included A Sahibs' War in his collection of Kipling's best stories. And what, too, of The Captive, a story which incidentally disproves the contention that in the work of this period upper-class officers are "rigorously excluded from his sympathy"?