The Light That Failed

The novel opens with a harsh portrait of childhood. For ten years Dick is in the hands of his guardian, Mrs Jennett: she never shows him affection, beats him, and once she catches him lying to escape a beating she brands him an incorrigible liar. Kipling draws here on memories of his own unhappy childhood years in Southsea, and the result is bitter: the boy learns to lie only when necessary, and plausibly. The orphan Maisie arrives in this house and on the very first day tells Mrs Jennett that if she is touched she will write to her lawyer — a rebellion Dick never managed.

The beach scene sets up the novel's key symbols. The two children save up to buy an old Belgian revolver, Maisie's goat Amomma eats the cartridges, and a shot fired by Maisie passes right by Dick's face, blackening it with powder grains. In that very smoke Dick confesses his love and Maisie says, “I promise.” Dick doesn't know what he will become and says he draws caricatures of the masters; Maisie replies, “Then be a painter.” In the dark at the door of the house Dick whispers, “I adore you, Maisie.”

Chapters two and three are Kipling at his strongest. The action moves to the Sudan campaign of the 1880s: General Gordon besieged in Khartoum, boats moving up the Nile, correspondents, ragged soldiers in the desert. Torpenhow spots a young man calmly sketching the dead among the wreckage and gets him taken on by the syndicate. The battle scene is harsh and cinematic: the battalion forming a square, yellow dust, Dick wounded in the head by a sword cut. That night, feverish, Dick looks at the Nile and keeps pleading “Maisie”, while Torpenhow sits by his side.

Back in London, Dick goes hungry for a month, then rents a studio with Torpenhow's help. One of the most memorable scenes is the reckoning with the syndicate manager: since there was no contract, the manager claims Dick's hundred and fifty or so sketches as the agency's property, and Dick literally beats him until the drawings are handed back. The scene is both comic and unsettling: Dick has become a man drunk on fame who believes the world owes him.

Chapter five opens the central argument about art. Dick shows “The Last Shot”, painted for a weekly magazine: the first sketch was full of blood and fear, but now the soldier is clean-shaven, his helmet polished and his face shows “a deep peace” — because that is what the public wants, and it pays twice as much. Torpenhow warns that this is dangerous: easy money is intoxicating, and you start doing bad work without noticing. Kipling himself had won quick fame in those years, and the dialogue reads like the author arguing with himself.

Chapters six and seven are weaker. Maisie is sketched in a few lines as a woman who wants her “freedom”, cold to Dick's feelings and interested only in his advice on painting; her red-haired impressionist friend is close to a caricature. The novel's judgements on women artists — “a woman's work!” — sit badly today. The Turkish translation is in an old, heavy style.

• A harsh, cinematic depiction of the Sudan battle
• A convincing male friendship between Dick and Torpenhow
• Lively dialogues on the conflict between art and commerce