Books Not having visited a newsroom yet myself, I don’t know how accurate Kipling’s description of the Bombay Mail at the opening of
The Man who would be King is, but it’s exactly how I’ve always imagined, understandable given the author was working as a journalist in India when writing these stories. Evocatively expressed between semi-colons, this is a disorganised chaos of humanity working against the odds in a barely comfortable, stiflingly humid atmosphere, to produce a coherent message or at the very least fill a newspaper's columns with informative content from some mostly reputable sources. Kipling’s style is an acquired taste, as messy but flavoursome as the cuisine of the country he’s evoking, only really gaining momentum in those stories with a vivid, psychologically challenging idea like The Haunted Rickshaw or At Twenty-Two, in which a mining disaster inspired by Emile Zola’s Germinal is transposed to Kipling's country of origin.
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