'And then,' it was a boy's voice, curiously level and even, 'De Vitre said we were beastly funks not to help, and I said there were too many chaps in it to suit us.'

In her introduction to Frost in May, Elizabeth Bowen remarks that 'Stalky and Co. fits into no classification: one might call it an early gangster tale in a school setting.' Set at a lower-prestige English public school designed to feed boys into the Army, following the Machiavellian antics of 'Stalky', M'Turk and Beetle (the latter a semi-autobiographical portrait of Kipling), Stalky and Co. is a harsh, witty gallop through the backstreets of Empire. Morality and conditions are Spartan: getting away with things and avenging slights are the only priorities, and the cunning - the 'stalkiness', hence Stalky's nickname - is explicitly linked in the final chapters to Britain's success in ruling other nations. We are not reading Tom Brown's School Days - Stalky and chums openly mock such pious works - and Britain's imperial dominance is not a question of, in Kipling's more triumphalist phrase, 'the white man's burden': instead, it's the dominance secured by men trained as wayward, cynical schoolboys, with the ruthless ego and eye to others' weakness that can be used to divide and rule.

For anyone who considers children innocent, then, or for anyone who considers imperialism a bad thing, Stalky and Co. is a dark book. The narrative tone, though, is less a lament than a wry shrug: this is how it is, you need to be strong enough to survive it.

So we begin with that 'curiously level and even' boy's voice - that 'curiously' an unusual piece of editorialising in the narrative, which seldom makes any kind of comment on what kind of boys these are. It's an adjective both admiring and unnerved - we must take care not to underestimate what this voice is saying, for whatever else it is, the narrative suggests it's authoritative.

And what it says is, for a schoolboy, notable. It's striking, for instance, that it completely rejects the stereotypical schoolboy code that makes cowardice (the meaning of 'funk', in this context) the worst of accusations. Someone has called this boy a coward, and he simply doesn't care: he has rejected the plan out of a cool-headed assessment of its chances, and if the planners think that's cowardice that's their mistake; he certainly isn't about to follow an unlikely plan just because someone dared him. In a single phrase, the traditional code of pluck and honour is cast aside, and we know we are in transgressive territory.

As well as being confident, the boy's assessment is, as Bowen describes, gangsterish ... or else, perhaps, military, for pace Bowen, I'd incline to categorise Stalky and Co. less as a gangster tale and more as a series of adventure yarns that happen to take place in the English countryside. To begin with, he judges the numbers - 'too many chaps' - with a professional air: to know at a glance how many people one needs to pursue a scheme suggests considerable experience. More than that, there's a definite note of us-and-them in his voice. The 'we' evidently includes his listeners, and he has rejected a plan without consulting them - must have, since he's now telling them that he's done it - in the confident expectation that they won't object, but at the same time he's taking the trouble to relay the conversation in detail, which suggests he has some respect for them as well. What we're hearing is a consultation between a tight-knit group, boys who know each other well enough to speak for each other and to talk to each other. Likewise, De Vitre, whoever that may be, has called the whole group 'beastly funks' when only the speaker seems to have been present at the conversation: their status as a unit is acknowledged from the outside. This is the closeness of boys away from home and family, the cliquishness of a school, turned outwards to a state of low-key guerilla war against everyone else.

As to us, the readers, we can only judge any of this because of what we hear, and what we hear, we hear from the position of eavesdroppers, coming in in mid-conversation with no explanation of who the speaker is, who De Vitre is, what the scheme is, or what the schoolboy cant means (though the latter would of course have been more familiar to Kipling's contemporaries). In effect, we're dropped in the deep end like new pupils at this school, to sink or swim as we can manage.

The tone of the boy, in other words, is like the tone of the whole story: unapologetic. Nothing will be cushioned for us. To keep up, we must follow Stalky's example and make a quick assessment of the situation: either we can handle the sudden introduction of plot and complexity of plotting, or we can't, and if we can't, that's our problem.