A vivid tale of Kipling in Vermont
The Jungle Law, By Victoria Vinton, McAdam/Cage, 312 pp, $25
In her debut novel, ''The Jungle Law," it seems at first as if Victoria Vinton is backing into a story about Rudyard Kipling with an awkward and contrived method: using Kipling's Vermont neighbors in the countryside near Brattleboro to point out the dramatic differences in the lifestyles of a struggling farm family and an elite, pampered Brit.
Kipling, whose childhood was spent in Bombay and whose creativity was encouraged by the forces around him there, moved to Vermont, his wife's birthplace, in 1892, to write in quiet and gain some financial comfort after carelessly losing money while living in London. His writing was beginning to bring him fame, and he was just starting to create his beloved ''The Jungle Book."
But as Vinton weaves her tale of a pampered son of a well-connected British family together with the difficult life of the Connollys, second-generation Irish living a hardscrabble life, the mingling of the two begins to make sense. Joe Connolly Jr., the Connollys' 11-year-old son, dutifully does his farm chores while watching out for his alcoholic father's wrath, which can erupt without warning and send the small family, already accustomed to dark days, into even more despair.
As Joe meets up with the 26-year-old writer (Joe delivers laundry that his mother has done for the ''fancy" family up the hill), he becomes charmed by Kipling's childlike imagination. Kipling shows Joe how to ride a bicycle. He tells Joe stories of wild elephants dancing in the moonlight, and of the jungle boy, Mowgli, and all the other creatures with Hindi names that he is in the process of creating.
Joe Connolly Jr. is intrigued and captivated by the man who is as different from his father as night from day, and the more time he spends with Kipling the more inspired he is to leave his dysfunctional family and make his own way in the world, which he eventually does. Although Kipling, whose memoirs begin with the proposition, ''Give me the first six years of a child's life and you can have the rest," doesn't catch Joe Jr. that early, he influences the novel's primary character enough to make a great and positive difference in his adult life.
Meanwhile, Vinton's descriptions -- of the Vermont countryside, of Addie Connolly's tender love for her son, of Kipling's troubled but colorful childhood in foster and family homes from India to England, of the childbirth of Kipling's firstborn with Addie Connolly as unexpected midwife -- are so vivid and detailed in some cases that they seem better than seeing the real thing. When Kipling was Joe's age, for example, Vinton creates his view of India as ''that whole tumultuous riot of muezzin cries and opium dens, of hawkers and lepers and filth." When Addie shows her baby son Joe the routine sights around the farm -- apples, cows, and pigs -- she sees in the baby's eyes that these things are ''transfigured into more than they had before, into something resplendent, astonishing, a source of delight and joy," and she sees for herself the joys and wonders of motherhood.
In this strange and unlikely warp and woof of two disparate families, Vinton has in the end woven a lovely cloth of good value.
