Man, do I love me some Kipling. It's not a joke to say that I spend a pretty decent chunk of my younger life, book or verse of Kipling in hand, sword branch in the other, swinging my way through the wilds of rural North Carolina. Adventure, combat, philosophy, reason, ideals for manhood.. all to be found in Kipling's body of work.
To say that I have great respect for that work is to put it mildly.
Rikki Tikki Tavi is one of those "books" (It can be had as a separate book, but it's really a short story from one of the Jungle Book collections) that really stuck with me as a kid. It's about a young Mongoose that finds himself, after being cast from his home by a swollen river, embroiled in a small war for control over a compound in India where a family lives. The war, of course, is with snakes.
Great book. Short! But great, simply because it gets right down to the damned point without much knocking about. Does the Mongoose need a reason to fight a snake? No, because that's what Mongoose do; they fight and eat snakes. You do get the sense that the Mongoose (Rikki) knows what he is doing is gallant, but that kind of takes a back seat to his just wanting to rise to the challenge. A sentiment that I can appreciate.
It's about time to revisit my scale for reviewing books, because I think that they are getting skewed away from the low to medium side in favor of mid 70's reviews. This may be an artifact that my book selection has been edited to only books that I think I will enjoy, but that being said the average enjoyment really should be an even 50, not a 75. A 75 should be *really* enjoying a book, and a perfect 100 should mean that I enjoyed the book immensely, then turned around and read it again and found no flaws in it. Rikki Tikki Tavi really, then, falls right in the mid 60's because while I did really enjoy it, it could have been a bit longer. Oh, not much longer, perhaps a second chapter where the children of Nag and Nagina from a prior clutch of eggs come to exact revenge. Consequences and whatnot. Still, it's a great book, and one would do well to read it.
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