Abaft The Funnel
Abaft The Funnel
Abaft the funnel, where the ship's smoke curls overhead and the watch has nothing but time, that's where men gather to tell their lies. Kipling's thirty-one early stories are those lies: tall tales spun by sailors in port, soldiers between campaigns, engineers waiting for the monsoon to break. Some are set on the turbid waters of the Irrawaddy, others in the dusty cantonments of British India, still others in the raw colonies where empire is being built by men who've left home behind. The storytelling is raw and wickedly funny, full of local color and hard-won wisdom. These are not polished literary exercises but yarns told aloud, with all the padding and embellishment that implies. There's a generosity to them, a sense of men sharing their strangest truths over rum and tobacco. Reading them now feels like eavesdropping on a vanished world of male companionship and imperial swagger, where every stranger has a story and every story is at least slightly false. For readers who love Kipling at his most energetic and unfiltered, before he became the laureate of empire.
X-Ray
