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The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling - review
There is probably not a single child in the world without a preconceived idea of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. Show me one who doesn't know about Mowgli's adventures through the jungle with bumbling, kindly Baloo and cunning Bagheera, thanks to Disney's version of the book.
However, start reading the original and all preconceived notions might as well be thrown out the window. This is a dark and often unhappy tale which left me nervous and frightened and is more prone to cause a nightmare than a sweet dream.
Kipling tells the story of little Mowgli, a village boy who falls into the hands of a pack of wolves who raise him as their own in the Indian jungle. As he matures he starts to understand the 'Law of the Jungle' and the book follows his many adventures alongside the myriad creatures around him. Those include Baloo the bear and Bagheera the black panther, who become his tutors and protectors. As a child reader, one of the most disturbing parts of this relationship is the physical violence Baloo and Bagheera continuously seem to use against Mowgli as part of their teaching.
'Bagheera gave him half a dozen love taps (…) but for a seven-year-old boy [this] amounted to as severe a beating as you could wish to avoid.' I found it very difficult to like these two characters because of this abuse towards Mowgli and without sympathetic characters to relate to the book was hard to enjoy. I wanted Mowgli to escape from these two almost as much as I wanted him to escape the terrible monkeys. I don't think Kipling intended the reader to feel this way, but perhaps in his days, hitting a child was more common.
Kipling does manage to create an intense world that sucks you in with his descriptions of the jungle and the creatures that live there. I felt myself hearing the strange noises, feeling the ground slither with snakes and sweating in the heat of the penetrating environment of the jungle's overpowering force. When Mowgli swings from the vines in the gripped of the monkeys I thought it was a moment of release and wanted him to swing to freedom. But once again, the terror of the place gets the better of him and he is back down below suffering another beating for getting himself into trouble.
After reading this classic, I actually felt rather bewildered: it didn't contain a single character that I either understood or felt empathy towards. I should have felt some harmony with Mowgli as a young boy, but I didn't understand why he was not miserable in his situation. Why would he like and respect Baloo and Bagheera when they physically hurt him for no reason at all?
The books I enjoy give me a character I can understand and root for, but in my opinion The Jungle Book has failed here. Rather than a page-turner I found myself fearful to turn the pages of Kipling's book, as I knew I would be haunted by Mowgli's sad existence.
Buy this book at the Guardian Bookshop .
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