The Ruskin Bond Omnibus
By Ruskin Bond
Rupa & Co, Rs. 395

Fans of Ruskin Bond, rejoice. The Ruskin Bond Omnibus is out and it might just qualify as a collector’s item. Only if you are a fan, that is. For some of the stories are quite boring. The Girl They Couldn’t Hang, for example, is a story about a country girl, wrongly hanged, who survives miraculously, while the culprits die within days. The humour is quite stale here. The first story too, based on Casanova’s memoirs from his time at the hands of the Inquisition, might try your patience because of its slow pace.

The collection has been divided into four sections, titled Great Escapes, Thrills and Spills, Thrilling Tales and Strange Men Strange Places.

Some of them are first-person accounts of hair-raising adventures by various authors and some are by Bond himself. Under Great Escapes, Michael Donovan’s Escape from the Foreign Legion makes an impression. Donovan recounts a wonderful tale of friendship between him and a Scotsman in the hostile terrain of Algeria where both were serving as volunteers with the French Foreign Legion. It is a tale of survival and keeps you hooked right till the last word.

The collection gets really interesting once you get to the next part. From a woman lion tamer’s first day with the lions in First Day in the Life of a Lion Trainer to a little boy’s Escape From Java during the Japanese invasion, the stories are brimming with suspense and adventure.

There is a rather informative story in Daniel P. Mannix’ Steel Into Your Stomach which throws light on how professional sword swallowers perform. But it is not “intended as a do-it yourself”, cautions Bond.

The pick of the lot is The Falcon and I by Jean George. It is a tale of a lonely young girl finding an unlikely companion in a falcon. It’s the kind of story that reminds you of Jim Corbett and Robin — “the biggest-hearted and the most faithful friend man ever had”. The friendship between the girl and the falcon meets a different fate from Corbett and Robin, who, Corbett famously wrote in The Man-Eaters of Kumaon, “has gone to the Happy Hunting Ground, where I know I shall find him waiting for me”.

The last section is a retelling of various incidents and heroic deeds that have appeared in newspapers from long ago. They’re fun to read if you like history outside the bounds of your school books. One wishes though that the Omnibus contained more of Bond’s stories. It has only one by him.