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Rudyard Kipling
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Plain Tales from the Hills Paperback – 10 January 2009

by Kipling (Author)
4.1 out of 5 stars 137
Edition: Reissue
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This was Kipling's first published volume of fiction. The stories with their brevity and concentration of effect are a landmark in the history of the short story. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
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  1. ISBN-10
    0199538611
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0199538614
  3. Edition
    Reissue
  4. Publisher
    Oxford University Press UK
  5. Publication date
    10 January 2009
  6. Language
    English
  7. Dimensions
    19.3 x 12.7 x 1.78 cm
  8. Print length
    320 pages
  9. See all details
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Product description

Book Description

This volume--Kipling's first collection of prose fiction--contains a selection of powerful stories about life in British India, including "Thrown Away," "False Dawn," "A Germ-Destroyer," and "In the House of Suddhoo."

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press UK; Reissue edition (10 January 2009)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0199538611
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0199538614
  • Reading age ‏ : ‎ 13 years and up
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 19.3 x 12.7 x 1.78 cm
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 out of 5 stars 137

About the author

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Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling

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Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was born in Bombay in December 1865. He returned to India from England shortly before his seventeenth birthday, to work as a journalist first on the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, then on the Pioneer at Allahabad. The poems and stories he wrote over the next seven years laid the foundation of his literary reputation, and soon after his return to London in 1889 he found himself world-famous. Throughout his life his works enjoyed great acclaim and popularity, but he came to seem increasingly controversial because of his political opinions, and it has been difficult to reach literary judgements unclouded by partisan feeling.

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Top review from Australia

Tim Hill
1.0 out of 5 stars Don't buy this book!
Reviewed in Australia on 25 September 2020
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For reasons I can't understand, this text of this book has replaced many of Kipling's words with synonyms of his original words. It is as if this book has been translated from English into another language and then back into English.

Here's the first two sentences from this book:
"She became the daughter of Sonoo, a Hill-man, and Jadeh his spouse. One yr their maize failed, and two bears spent the night time in their only poppy-discipline just above the Sutlej Valley at the Kotgarth aspect; so, next season, they grew to become Christian, and brought their toddler to the Mission to be baptized."

Here's what Kipling actually wrote:
"She was the daughter of Sonoo, a Hill-man, and Jadeh his wife. One year their maize failed, and two bears spent the night in their only poppy-field just above the Sutlej Valley on the Kotgarth side; so, next season, they turned Christian, and brought their baby to the Mission to be baptized."

You don't want this book. It's worse in every way.
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Rekha
5.0 out of 5 stars Every house should have this
Reviewed in India on 20 February 2019
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Been wanting to read this book , quite interesting stories .
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Client d'Amazon
1.0 out of 5 stars No page number
Reviewed in France on 2 February 2018
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This book has no page number, which makes the table of contents useless. One can hardly find each novel without searching the whole book page by page... Annotations are actually just the location of the first edition, and a summary most often re-citing sentences extracted from the text body.
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Oliver Twist
5.0 out of 5 stars The British Abroad
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 26 September 2018
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My understanding is that in India there are the Plains and there are the Hills (a euphemistic term for the Himalayas) so there is something of a pun carried in the title 'Plain Tales from the Hills'.

You could not wish to find forty more varied and penetrating stories about Anglo/Indian society under the Raj than those which make up this book. They provide us with a brilliant series of windows through which we can look into the social and administrative life of Simla, the summer capital of the Indian Empire. Besides this, they touch upon a very wide range of subjects which include suicide, (implied) transvestism, opium addiction and infant mortality; love variously lost, found and misplaced; careerism, charlatanry, sportsmanship and the supernatural. The brevity of the individual stories, coupled with what the publisher rightly calls their 'concentration of effect', means that very few of them will waste the reader's time.

Kipling was twenty when he began writing them, and twenty-two when they were first published in collected form. They were written in the latter half of the 1880s, when he was working as an assistant editor for the 'Civil and Military Gazette' in Lahore, north-western India (now Pakistan). It was this journalistic experience which brought him into daily contact with all sorts and conditions of life in India, and it was in the CMG (a daily newspaper) that these stories were first published, in the form of a series.

I think it is worth pointing out that if the British Empire in India was 'a middle-class paradise' - as one of the characters in these stories refers to it as being - then Kipling does take some pains to include the role played by the working class in its maintenance, principally by way of those tales which feature privates Learoyd, Ortheris and Mulvaney, Kipling's 'Soldiers Three'. There are also stories in this collection which penetrate quite deeply into the lives of the native population, of which 'In the House of Suddhoo' would be but one example, and I think it is true that Kipling did see a correlation between the Indian caste system and the British class system; referring to one British regiment, for example, as being 'high-caste'.

There are occasions in the 'Plain Tales' when I think that Kiplng does affect the manner and tone of voice of a man of considerably more years and experience than he actually had at the time he wrote them. As a result of this, one wonders how reliable his judgement of people and events actually is. Neverthless, one has to acknowledge that these stories were very popular at the time they were written, both amongst their intended local audience and, later, with the wider global readership. And to this day they remain amongst the most popular and widely read of his works. Given his remarkable talents as a storyteller, poet and prose stylist, it is not difficult to see why this is the case. Plus these forty short stories do provide us with a perhaps unparalleled contemporary insight into the values and functioning of Anglo/Indian society at the Victorian apex of the Raj. To this end, Kipling was the right man, in the right place, at the right time.

I suppose that Kipling's status as a journalist meant that he was somewhat semi-detached from the society which he describes. Being neither a military man, nor a member of the Indian Civil Service, possibly meant that he was not quite so dependant upon these institutions for preferment, or even for approval of what he was doing, as others might have been. Even so, he would have had to tread the social and political tightropes with some care, and he was certainly 'inside' enough to have been invited, or sent by his newspaper, to Simla (and other Hill stations) for 'the season'. Presumably in order to report upon their goings on. It is from these places and vantage points that he clearly gleaned a great deal of the material for the 'Plain Tales', and a stunningly good collection of stories they are, too.

Note: This review relates to the 'Oxford World's Classics' edition which contains an Introduction and General Preface by Andrew Rutherford, a chronology of Kipling's life and works, as well as Explanatory Notes for the Indian terms which the reader will encounter in the text.
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margaretshaw
4.0 out of 5 stars A useful edition
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 17 November 2020
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Enjoying so far. Belong to a Kipling reading group and read several stories each week.
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D. S. Winefield
4.0 out of 5 stars Nostalgia for 60 year olds
Reviewed in the United States on 12 August 2006
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I bought this book to recall the halcyon days of my secondary schooling in the years 1957 - 61. Then the book was an assigned text for all students in English in New Zealand. The language and the concepts were then frankly beyond the comprehension of 15 year olds. As I grew older, I became aware of the position Kipling held in the Late Victorian era, and the period following the end of the First World War.

I came to understand a little of what the British Empire meant in those times, and the great debt owed by the world to the British Army which subdued Iraq, Pakistan, and the Indian Continent for almost 200 years.

Without the benefit of the bomb, with a tiny armed service, and a desire to provide fair and equitable government, the Raj governed fearlessly through the efforts of the thirds sons of many of the great English Families, while the fourth sons provided the humanity of the Church. Patterns we could well emulate again today!

This was bread and butter to Kipling. In his early years as a huge supporter of the system, as a spiritualist after the death of his son in the First World War, and in his later years as the designer of the huge Military Cemetaries established in France and Belgium after the War to the Empire's dead, he truly became in his own words a "Builder of the Silent Cities".

In 2006, the concepts of his writings are remote from many. In terms of the trials of people, and their attempts to rise over their circumstances through a sense of duty and moral propriety, Kipling's works are without peer. For those starting out to discover him, start with "Stalky and Company", and move to this book, and his other works as extended learning. I hope you come to love his simple characters as I have, and that your School System, and its weird sense of Boyhood Literature does not destroy the desire to read Kipling until your late 60's

This book has brought great joy to someone in the prime of life, and brings back some important memories of Scouts, Church and Honour in a time when these are so sadly lacking.
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