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For generations, Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Books have brought the exotic locale of India to readers on the other side of the world. But far from its tropical setting, Kipling's creation first began when he was newly installed in a quiet corner of Vermont, designing his dream house. Mixing fact with fiction, Vinton describes a Kipling who tends to his pregnant wife and journeys to town for supplies, his presence causing a bit of a stir. Even his stoic neighbors, the Connollys, can't help but wonder about the Kiplings and their uppity ways. Eleven-year-old Joe Connolly feels curiously drawn to the eccentric writer and eagerly anticipates regular updates on the adventures of Mowgli, which Kipling shares with him at their sporadic meetings. But Joe's father is suspicious and resentful of his son's new companion, and his mother feels removed from the strange world Joe is learning to relish.
A work rich in imagination and history, The Jungle Law also brings to life Kipling's early years in Bombay and his growing fame in England, illuminating his struggle to write and the isolation he felt though surrounded by family. Through these difficulties, however, new stories took root -- stories that represent a new world for Joe and threaten to divide his family. Crafted with grace and intelligence, The Jungle Law is a remarkable novel about the potential -- and consequences -- of imagination.
(Holiday 2005 Selection)
The Jungle Law
Narrated by Henry Strozier
Victoria VintonUnabridged — 10 hours, 23 minutes
The Jungle Law
Narrated by Henry Strozier
Victoria VintonUnabridged — 10 hours, 23 minutes
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Overview
Editorial Reviews
By navigating both rural living in all its hardscrabble grit and the world of the imagination in its most vibrant bloom, Vinton plumbs human yearnings for more than the everyday and probes the transformative impact that storytelling can have on a willing audience -- both the lures of literature and the perils of conflating art with life. More to the point, though, Vinton also tells a great story, reason enough to pay these Kiplings and their neighbors a call.
— The Washington Post
Vinton handles Kipling's creative moments deftly, keeping desk-time to a minimum and constructing convincing epiphanies of composition. Given the appealing originality of the inquisitive, eccentric character Vinton makes of Kipling, the familiar dynamics of the Connolly family are a slight letdown. That we come away from the final chapter, set in 1935 when Kipling was working on his memoirs, feeling only kindly toward the aging author, is perhaps a larger lapse, but one external to Vinton's aims. It's good to have entered as thoroughly into Kipling's imagination as Vinton has allowed. It's important to know it's not the whole story.
— The New York Times
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), born to a British family in Bombay and raised by a foster family in England, moved to Vermont in 1892. He and his wife were basically broke, but his literary star was on the rise, and he sought a place to work and raise a family. First-time novelist Vinton, using a free and direct third person, presents Kipling's life there as he worked on what became The Jungle Books. When Kipling encounters a Vermont farm boy, Joe Connolly, Kipling uses storytelling to draw him out. Their relationship enrages the boy's father, depressed, aggressive Irish immigrant Jack. Jack can't, however, stop the writer and Joe from talking, and the two discuss a new character Kipling is turning over in his mind: Mowgli, abandoned in the jungle and raised by animals. Kipling proceeds to draw on his conversations with the impoverished boy, as well as his own experience with abandonment and with a cruel foster family, to develop Mowgli's story. But there's way too much distance between the omniscient narrator and Kipling and the others: Vinton gets into their heads effectively enough but doesn't render what she finds there with immediacy or abandon. (Oct. 3) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
In keeping with the recent trend of using historical authors as characters in fictional works, here is a novel about Rudyard Kipling during the relatively little-known period when he resided outside Brattleboro, VT. Recently married, and with his American wife, Caroline, pregnant with their first child, Kipling is at work on The Jungle Book during one of the most productive periods in his career. Intertwined with the Kiplings' story is that of their impoverished neighbors. Addie Connolly does the Kiplings' laundry, while her son, Joe, has befriended Rudyard; these things embitter and bemuse Addie's husband, Joe, an Irish immigrant. Readers, too, will wonder whether the celebrated British writer is generously sharing his Jungle Book with Joe or exploiting him by using his reactions to early drafts to fine-tune the story for a young readers' market. Ultimately, the Connolly family finds themselves profoundly influenced by their brush with literature. Vinton's elaborate prose style contributes to the novel's late Victorian sensibility. A good addition for larger fiction collections.-Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ. Libs., Harrisonburg, VA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Rudyard Kipling, living in rural Vermont, writes The Jungle Book and changes the destiny of his neighbors. Vinton sets her first novel in the late-19th century and constructs it around the contrasting households of an emerging writer and a struggling immigrant farmer. Kipling and his proud, pregnant wife Carrie have arrived to build their dream house, Naulakha, on land adjacent to Jack Connolly's small spread. Kipling, with his exotic background combining India and England, relishes the beauty and isolation of this remote location; Connolly, Irish and disappointed, fumes against and fears the harsh winter and his endlessly backbreaking, scarcely profitable work. The families interact through Addie Connolly, who does the Kiplings' laundry, and Jack's 11-year-old son Joe, who falls under the spell of Kipling's whimsical inventiveness. A dreamy, sensitive boy, Joe is initially enchanted by the writer's energy; when invited to advise on the story of Mowgli and his animal companions, he begins to identify with the fictional child. Winter closes in as Carrie-assisted by Addie-gives birth to a daughter, but Joe, having broken his leg in an accident, retreats a little from Kipling. In the spring, the writer asks Jack, an ex-railway man, to help dynamite some land. The combination of Jack's slow-burning anger, Kipling's distracting waywardness and Joe's torn loyalties leads to another, more emotional explosion. Joe runs away from home, leaving the two couples to go their separate ways. Addie sees the wisdom of Joe's absence and works to restore closeness with Jack; Kipling, simultaneously dominated and protected by Carrie, will achieve success but also experience great grief and loss. Vinton minesa rich vein of intensity whether writing about landscape and weather, or the soul-expanding possibilities of the creative life. While her characterizations can be overdrawn, especially those of the Kiplings, and the narrative oddly paced, the confident empathy of Vinton's writing moves the story beyond its weak spots. Another novel about a novelist, but radiantly colored, sensuous, respectful and rapt; an impressive debut. First printing of 45,000
Praise for Victoria Vinton’s The Jungle Law:
“Vinton handles Kipling’s creative moments deftly, keeping desk-time to a minimum and constructing convincing epiphanies of composition...It’s good to have entered as thoroughly into Kipling’s imagination as Vinton has allowed.”
–The New York Times
“[A] lyrical, elegant first novel. . .Even if you’ve never spent time with Kipling’s writing, you’ll savor making his acquaintance and meeting his compelling fictional neighbor.”
–People Magazine
"The Jungle Law is a simmering book of small acts of violence, disappointments and the undeniable power of Kipling’s stories.”
–Los Angeles Times
“Vinton’s descriptions . . . are so vivid and detailed in some cases that they seem better than seeing the real thing. . .In this strange and unlikely warp and woof of two disparate families, Vinton has in the end woven a lovely cloth of good value.”
–The Boston Globe
Victoria Vinton interweaves fact and fiction, starting with Rudyard Kipling’s move to Vermont in 1892 and adding an imaginary relationship with a local boy, Joe Connelly, to explore the birth of the Mowgli tales. Henry Strozier’s performance has the sound and tone of a documentary. His strong unemotional reading adds credibility to the fictional elements, making them believable. While 26-year-old Kipling and his wife settle in Vermont to await the birth of their first child, he is also nurturing the seed of the story of Mowgli in his fertile imagination. Vinton’s tale may well send you looking for a more complete biography of this fascinating literary giant. N.E.M. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940170967070 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Recorded Books, LLC |
| Publication date: | 03/04/2008 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
The Jungle Law
By Victoria Vinton
MacAdam/Cage Publishing
ISBN: 1-59692-149-8Chapter One
REMEMBER THE NIGHT IS FOR HUNTINGThree o'clock and all is not well. Sleep has abandoned him again. He sits bolt upright in his bed, panic rising from his stomach like bile. In the past eight months he has crossed two oceans and whole continents-from Bombay to London, New York, Vancouver, Yokohama, and halfway back-and now, dislocated by the darkness and the hour and the jumbled swirl of distances he's come, he does not know where he is.
He looks around but can make out nothing, not even the hump of a bedpost. This is not surprising since he's been all but blind since the age of twelve. That was when his eyes went wrong, as he likes to say, and his aunt, the Good Aunt, the Beloved Aunt Georgiana, found him pummeling a mulberry tree, thinking it was a monster.
"There, there," she'd said soothingly, guiding him back to the Grange with her hands on his shoulders. Then she set him up in the nursery with a pot of chamomile tea and proceeded to write two letters: one to a specialist she knew about in London who fitted him with glasses, the first of the wire-framed spectacles that he has worn ever since; and the second to his mother in India, urging her to return, thereby restoring to him both his vision and what had seemed the lost heart of his family.
He reaches for his spectacles now, his fingers routing over the bedclothes like the blunt snout of a mole. They sit on a nightstand next to the bed, where he fails to recall setting them. And as his fingers inch and grope and finally find and clutch them, he feels a grateful wave of relief, though the spectacles themselves have often been a source of shame. The Bad Aunt, Auntie Rosa, not really an aunt at all, saw them as an affectation, one more pretension of a spoiled, deceitful boy who was mocked and bullied and called Giglamps at school and made to sit in corners. And recently, with a pang of chagrin that he couldn't quite dispel, he has seen himself in the pages of newspapers portrayed by cartoonists and their lampooning pens with eyes as big as saucers, as mill wheels, like the dogs in the old fairy tale.
He shoos these thoughts and images away as he sets his spectacles over his nose, blinks, and blinks again. Now out of the darkness he identifies shapes. A pine commode with a chipped china basin. A maple rocking chair. The other bed, twin to the one where he sits, where his new bride, Carrie, lies sleeping. And as the room contracts into this dim but manageable focus, he is able at last to give it a name: Home. This is his home.
Of course, he sees the irony here. The whole notion of home is as exotic to him as the ports of call in his travels. And this home, in particular, is not much to speak of. A hired man's cottage rented out for the season with money borrowed from his wife's family, with skunks in the cellar and no water save that from a half-inch lead pipe connected to a spring. It is an uninspiring backdrop for a man with his ambitions, though the sparseness and simplicity appeal to part of him. And besides, as soon as his fortunes change, as he knows they will, he plans to build a great ark of a house on the crest of a neighboring hill. Naulakha, he will call it. Jewel beyond price. A home to call his own.
He thinks of the building plans for that house rolled up in a drawer of his desk, the pencil-thin arrows that mark elevations, the arcs denoting doorways, the breaks in the lines that indicate windows that will open onto grand vistas. All comforting thoughts, though unfortunately not ones that will lead him back to sleep. From experience he knows that even though he has now located himself, pinpointed his exact position, here, in a corner of southeastern Vermont, that knowledge will not buy him safe passage back to the realm of rest. No, now the true torment of wakefulness begins. He lies there deep in the summer night listening to the sounds around him. There are crickets in the woodshed, frogs in the old cedar swamp, a parlor clock on the mantle shelf, chipping away at the hour. To his wife, he imagines, these sounds are lulling, the familiar backdrop of her childhood. It is not her curse to hear things as he does, to imagine that every croak and chirp, each tick and chime of the clock, mocks him for some failure-to fall asleep, to make a home, to see with his own two eyes-and deeper still, for some more basic lack of character or worth, that he does not wish to pursue.
So he says to himself what he has said before: the night has gotten into his head. And the phrase takes some of the edge away, transforming the night from a nemesis into something more foolish, but finally benign, a schoolboy on a prank. That sly, devil night up to its old tricks. How well and long he has known them! He thinks of Lahore, when he worked for the papers and his parents went up to the Hills, when the heat had the grip of a stranglehold and the night seemed to last forever. He would carry a pallet from room to room in a futile search for fresh air, setting it finally up on the roof where he'd make the waterboy douse his parched skin with water from a cistern, willing to risk the threat of disease for a few brief moments of rest. Or he'd give up on sleep entirely and just walk his way to dawn, wandering through the narrow alleys beyond the Delhi Gate, the moon above him a scorch in the sky, as white as the shrouds of the dead by the river and the marble of the Wazir Khan Mosque.
And earlier still, on the Brompton Road: was that the first time sleep failed him? In the thick of the night, with the clock inching forward and even the crickets wearying, the question seems suddenly urgent to him, as if, should he settle the matter of onset, he might decree an end.
So the Brompton Road: he is twelve years old, an owl of a boy in his new spectacles with a pet toad in his pocket. He has just been liberated from the House of Desolation, though he hasn't yet dubbed it that. That will be later when he gains more mastery, when he knows how words can be a revenge, how a phrase can sum up and dismiss-in this case six years of scoldings and cuffs and banishments to basements under the tyranny of Auntie Rosa and her lout of a son, fiendish Harry. For now he is too deliriously happy and grateful to think of phrase-making. His mother has finally returned from Bombay, appearing out of nowhere on Auntie Rosa's doorstep in a broad-brimmed hat tied under her chin with a skein of white chiffon, looking for all the world like an angel or a fairy godmother in a tale. She has taken him and his sister, Trix, away from that horrid place and installed them here, in this rooming house on the Brompton Road, right across from the old South Kensington Museum. Here he should sleep in blissful peace, rescued at last from Auntie Rosa, reunited with his mother. But instead he finds himself wide awake, eyes open and ears alert.
At first it is thrilling to be up at this hour, the dark electrifying. He hears a stray cat caterwauling from a rooftop, the last omnibus bound for Knightsbridge, the deep and mysterious groaning of pipes from the walls of the water closet. He feels no fear, only a strange, exhilarating sense of power. He is a sahib, a sultan, a raja, and this is his domain, a world of flickering shadows and moonlight and at least one minion, the toad. It sits by his bedside in a specimen dish, as wide awake as he is: the wart-riddled back in dulled jewel colors-emerald, topaz, gold-the barreled chest with its palpitations; the filmy, bulbous eyes. He stares at it, in a contest of wills, to see who will blink first. Boy or toad, master or lackey, each hunkered down and glaring. But when a breeze blows in the window, he turns away, distracted, and watches as the bedroom curtain first lifts then undulates, seeming to him like the arm of a wraith that beckons him outside.
So he grabs the toad and stuffs it into the pocket of his nightshirt, sets his new specs on the bridge of his nose, wriggles his feet into slippers. And then he is off, on an adventure, past the room where his mother sleeps, past the door to the landlady's quarters, down the back stairs, through the kitchen, the scullery, past the black heap of the coal box, to the door that leads out to a small walled-in garden, magical in the moonlight.
Immediately he claims the place as his own, a part of his empire: from the ancient horse chestnut that stands in one corner to the ginkgo tree in the other, an old stone birdbath, the thick ivy vines, and-now what's this?-an invader. Climbing onto the lip of a toppled urn he sees a marmalade cat on the rooftop, the one he must have heard from his room with its miserable rutting cry. Spying him too, the cat arches its back, then sits and lashes its tail as he scrambles to the horse chestnut tree and gathers an armful of seeds. These are hard, spiked balls, like the spheres of maces he imagines crusaders once must have swung outside Jerusalem, and he chucks them up at the cat who attempts to hide in the gutter. But it is no use: the cat is doomed. He throws another barrage of seeds, this time hitting his mark, and the old Tom slinks away over the slates, quickly conceding defeat, as he throws his arms up victoriously-and almost dislodges the toad. But when the cat has finally vanished among the chimney pots, instead of feeling a swell of triumph at a battle well fought and won, he is seized by a sudden, lonely ache and an emptiness in his bones.
In the sky the moon still shines but its light seems cold and barren. He smells for the first time the seeds from the ginkgo, fetid as rancid butter. And when he wanders to the birdbath, thinking that his toad might like a swim, he finds the scalloped basin choked by a scrim of algae scum. So he goes inside, retracing his steps, back through the kitchen and scullery, back up the winding stairs. Though when he comes to his mother's room, he pauses before slipping in.
She lies in the bed, her hair strewn across the pillows, thick strands of twisted gold, her skin as white as alabaster and still as stone as well, except for a thin blue vein in her temple that quivers as he comes closer. He stands by the bedside, watching her sleep, studying her face. Her eyes betray no signs of dreams, her nose doesn't flare with breath, though her lips seem to curve round the edge of a secret that he cannot begin to guess.
Then he feels the toad squirm in his pocket and takes it out for air, holding it in his two cupped hands where its shape and weight and beating thump make him feel like he holds a live heart. He knows, of course, what happened when a princess kissed a frog, but what if a frog kissed a princess instead? Would she wake from her slumbers, startled or grateful? Sprout warts and turn into a hag? Then kneeling down by his mother's bed as if to say his prayers, he lifts his cupped hands to her face, makes a small opening at his thumbs, so that the toad pokes out its head, straining its thin reptilian lips toward his mother's smile. And he notes with a curious detachment, an almost clinical calm, how the pulsing cords in the toad's throat seem to keep time with the fluttering vein in his mother's forehead just before she opens her eyes and lets out a piercing scream.
But no, that is not the way it happened. Or so he thinks now from his vantage of years and several thousand miles. He had simply thought the toad was thirsty and had wanted to give it a drink. What happened next was a comedy of errors, not some woeful tale. The toad leaped away, too slippery to catch, and landed on the nightstand where it toppled over a water jug, which crashed and broke on the floor. The sound was what woke his mother and Trix, who appeared in the doorway in a rumpled nightgown, rubbing sleep from her eyes, and their landlady too, bundled up in her wrapper, fretting about prowlers and Peeping Toms and all things combustible, as he got on all fours and crawled under the bed to catch the errant toad, feeling in truth more pride than shame at all the commotion he'd caused.
No, the only damaged thing in that room was the water jug, which wasn't worth much anyway. As worthless, he thinks, still wide awake, as this whole train of thought. He is no closer to sleep than he was when he first stirred up the memory, and from the thick pitch of black at the window he seems no closer to dawn. What he needs now is a new strategy, something else to focus upon, so he moves in his mind from those lodging rooms to the museum across the street, thinking, perhaps, he will catalog wonders, conjure up marvels like counting sheep to lull himself back to sleep.
Then he sees again the boy he was with a season pass in his hand, trembling as he enters the hall and stands beneath the dome. Thin light pours through the clerestory windows filled with whole galaxies of motes, and the guard gives him a nod and salute and, if he is lucky, a toffee. Then he is in the galleries, chock-full of amazing things. Giltwood boxes, altarpieces, coffers, ewers, globes. Helmets, gameboards, ivory combs, daggers, goblets, lutes. There is a mountain of a clock, all weights and dials and wheels, that shows not just the time of day but the Zodiac signs and the phase of the moon and the tides at London Bridge. And a candlestick made of molten gold whose base is a column of goblins, scrambling up from the pit of hell, each climbing on top of another. He loves the grand, heroic sculptures-Samson Slaying a Philistine, Neptune Taming a Seahorse-along with the small, more intimate objects: the pendant made from a narwhal's tusk (could it be a unicorn's horn?), the salt cellar in the shape of a ship whose hull is a nautilus shell.
Such a stirring of tenderness he suddenly feels for his young, impressionable self! If only he could stay in those rooms, the air thick with dust and the piety of art, where everything was labeled and ordered with dates and provenance and he, himself, was in a state of pure and simple awe. But already his mind has wandered to another Wonder House: the Grange, the home of Aunt Georgiana and his Uncle Ned. He spent his Christmas holidays there, on leave from Auntie Rosa, playing charades and rounds of snapdragon-snatching plums from bowls of flaming brandy-dawdling, drawing, watching magic lantern shows: all rich, heady stuff for a boy whose usual diet was Proverbs and canings. And best of all there was Aunt Georgiana, reading the tales of Scheherazade in the nursery late at night, and Uncle Ned with his practical jokes and ventriloquist voices and paintings. He would hang his works-in-progress along the house's passageways, large canvases with figures sketched in charcoal and only the eyes painted in. There was Merlin and Nimue with her books of spells, Circe with her potions, knights and damsels, undines, gorgons, Briar Rose, and Galatea. He would pass them on his way to bed, each set of eyes marking his progress. Wistful, vacant, they haunt him still, staring out of the white void of canvas with their yearnings and their needs. He would scare himself by imagining that he was subject to the fates depicted in the paintings. He might be turned into a swine or a laurel tree, be drawn by a siren into dark, murky depths where he would flail and drown. And so he'd creep down the hallway cautiously, bolting the last stretch to the nursery door where Aunt Georgiana stood patiently waiting with Sinbad and Ali Baba in hand.
Now, as if there's no safety in distance and years, he feels those eyes upon him again, those baleful, longing glances. And amid that perilous sea of stares, he sees his great friend Wolcott, his wife's younger brother who died eight months ago in Dresden, felled by typhoid. There he is, miraculously risen from the dead and reinstalled in his old digs across from Westminster Abbey. The same old Wolcott, in his Inverness cape, poised on his balcony, waiting for him with the sherry decanter and a box of Indian cheroots, while beyond him a tottering gander of a bishop leads a gaggle of altar boys across the abbey yard.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Jungle Law by Victoria Vinton Excerpted by permission.
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