It's an acquired taste, perhaps, but one of the great pleasures of the Jungle Book stories is the sonorous, Biblical language the animals speak. These are classic coming-of-age stories, but the maturing of Mowgli is a troublesome and ambiguous journey where he is torn not between nature and civilisation, but between two different civilisations, for animals in Kipling's world are ruled by the Law of the Jungle (a system bizarrely adopted by Lord Baden-Powell and his Boy Scout movement: the junior scouts, or cubs, are still ruled by Akela, the wolf leader). He says they reach out to children and adults in different ways adult readers need to recognise "the primacy of fantasy, of dark inward play". The Mowgli stories of the "man-cub" abandoned in the jungle and reared by wolves have always had the strongest appeal to readers, and these are analysed in great detail by Daniel Karlin in his introduction to the 1987 Penguin Classics edition. Rudyard Kipling was a celebrated writer in his time.
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