It can hardly have been by chance that in 1960 it was Rosemary Sutcliff who wrote the Bodley Head monograph on the children's books of Rudyard Kipling, nor is it surprising that in it she remarked " … of all the writers of my childhood, he made the strongest impact on me, an impact which I have never forgotten,"… for no reader of her own books—except one totally ignorant of Kipling—can fail to be aware of her debt to him. Quite apart from certain identities of subject, there is an underlying identity of theme: what one might call the Conflict of Duty and Inclination. In the monograph she wrote that the Mowgli stories are " … a following-out of divided life and divided loyalties, the unbearable choice that has to be made and has to be borne" …; this might equally well be said of her own works, since she has scarcely a hero who does not have to make that "unbearable choice," with the making of and abiding by that choice very often the mainspring of the book. Just how deeply she has been influenced by Kipling I suspect that even she is not fully aware; that it goes beyond a casual borrowing of subject material may be shown in a review of her major works…. (p. 90)
Simon is the first Sutcliff work to have a recognizably Sutcliffian—one might almost say epic—flavour. It has many of the typical Sutcliff ingredients: young adult rather than child hero, a David-and-Jonathan friendship, above all a central conflict of Duty and Inclination. Simon has to choose between his duty to Parliament—his own and his father's political creed—and his friendship with Royalist Amias, just as Mowgli must choose between the Jungle and his humanity…. Simon, too, could easily be the typical Kipling subaltern as he learns his job in the New Model Army with the covert help of his troop. If the book has still a certain amount of Elizabeth Goudge (the dominant influence of the earlier works) it has yet come a long way from the mere prettiness of The Queen Elizabeth Story or The Armourer's House.
