The Wind in the Willows [book review]

The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; til he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms. Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing. It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said ‘Bother!’ and ‘O blow!’ and also ‘Hang spring cleaning!’ and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat.

So begins The Wind in the Willows.

Written by Kenneth Grahame and published in 1908, this classic children’s tale was born on the night of his only son Alastair’s fourth birthday. Alastair was an emotionally fragile child who was legally blind. On this night, overwhelmed by the social strain of his birthday celebration, he had fallen apart and was taken to his room.

It’s a reaction a born introvert can well understand.

His father sat with him, and when little Alastair requested a story, Grahame began this story. Over the years when Alastair was away at boarding school, his father sent him letters continuing the stories that eventually became this book. Grahame himself seems to be a man mourning a lost childhood. He grew up a motherless boy, with an alcoholic father, and was raised by an emotionally distant grandmother. As an adult, he acquired a bank job and a marriage, neither of which suited his temperament. His unspoken longing for the innocence and irresponsibility of childhood shades every chapter of The Wind in the Willows.

The story is built around a quartet of four unlikely animals. There is Mole, in a black velvet smoking jacket; Rat, with a grave round face and a poet’s intellect; Badger, with a moral and dignified demeanor; and Toad. Oh Toad. He is splashed in the midst of it all with a personality the size of a raging river. And so launches a story of wit and friendship.

Mole, with whom the story begins, leaves his half-cleaned little hovel behind him that fine spring morning and begins tramping about the countryside on a self-imposed vacation. 

After all, the best part of a holiday
is perhaps not so much to be resting yourself,
as to see all the other fellows busy working.

– Mole 

He soon comes upon something he’s never seen before. It is The River. And it is there he meets Water Rat, who loves his River, and never wants to leave. The River is his world, and of it he says, What it hasn’t got is not worth having, and what it doesn’t know is not worth knowing. Beyond the River is the Wild Wood. We don’t go there very much, we river-bankers, says Rat. And beyond that is the Wide World, of which he says, never been there, and I’m never going, nor you either, if you’ve got any sense at all. 

Mole is invited to spend some time with Rat and he gladly accepts the invitation, eager to learn more about this sparkling river world, and this easy-going little poet and dreamer who enjoys fine food and boating. 

Believe me, my young friend,
there is nothing – absolutely nothing –
half so much worth doing
as simply messing about in boats.

-Rat

Mole is gradually integrated into Rat’s world, and quite forgets his little underground home. He meets Rat’s friends and loses himself in happy days sailing the river and learns the beauty of food and home shared in friendship. One day, Rat’s friend Otter suddenly disappears with a splash into the water in the midst of a picnic. Mole is alarmed, but Rat politely hums as though nothing had happened and Mole recollects that animal-etiquette forbade any sort of comment on the sudden disappearance of one’s friends, for any reason or no reason whatever. 

I can’t help but wonder if this little incident was not tucked in as a nod to Alastair’s sudden disappearance from his birthday party. 

Mole is eventually introduced to Toad. Toad is a wealthy little fellow, arrogant with the ease of inherited money, yet he’s so good-hearted you can’t help but love him. He throws himself headlong into every adventure that strikes his fancy, embracing life with utter abandon. When Mole first meets him, he is just coming off a boating craze, with boats of every kind stacking his boathouse.

Once it was nothing but sailing, said Rat. Then he tired of that and took to punting. Nothing would please him but to punt all day and every day, and a nice mess he made of it. Last year it was house-boating, and we all had to go and stay with him in his houseboat, and pretend we liked it. He was going to spend the rest of his life in a houseboat. It’s all the same, whatever he takes up; he gets tired of it, and starts on something fresh.

True to form, Toad has now given up on boating and has instead bought himself a gypsy wagon. It is a camper of sorts, a canary-colored cart, upon which he intends to set out upon what he calls “The Life Adventurous.” He cajoles Mole and Rat into going with him, much against Rat’s will, and the three set out. On the second day, their cart and horse is run off the road by a speeding motorcar, and cart and horse and occupants are tumbled into a ditch. As Mole and Rat struggle to pick themselves out of the wreckage they find Toad sitting in the middle of the road, in a sort of trance, a happy smile on his face, his eyes still fixed on the dusty wake of their destroyer. They realize that he is completely lovestruck.

Glorious, stirring sight! sighs Toad. The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel! Here today – in next week tomorrow! Villages skipped, towns and cites jumped – always some body else’s horizon! Oh bliss! Oh my!

Oh what a flowery track lies
spread before me, henceforth!
What dust clouds shall spring up behind me
as I speed on my reckless way!
What carts I shall fling carelessly into the ditch
in the wake of my magnificent onset.
Horrid little carts – common carts –
canary colored carts!

-Toad

He’s quite hopeless, says Rat with a resigned sigh, and together they get Toad home where he immediately proceeds to plunge whole-heartedly into his motor-car craze. Mole and Rat leave him to his devices and return to their home in the riverbank to wile away the lazy days of winter. During this time, Mole attempts an ill-fated venture into the Wild Woods, and meets Badger, who hates society and invitations and dinner and all that sort of thing.

When Mole is safely home again on the riverbank after his Wild Woods adventure, he decides that he will leave the Wild Woods for others, and he will stay safely on the riverbank. Adventure and danger was fine for others, but as for him, he must be wise, must keep to the pleasant places in which his lines were laid and which held adventure enough, in their way, to last for a lifetime.

Toad, however, knows no such contentment. In his obsession he has proceeded to wreck motor car after motor car. News of his escapades have reached into the Wild Woods, and Badger eventually arrives, telling Mole and Rat that the hour has come to take Toad in hand. This very morning, says the Badger, another new and exceptionally powerful motorcar will arrive at Toad Hall. You two will accompany me instantly to Toad Hall, and the work of rescue shall be accomplished.

We never allow our friends
to make fools of themselves
beyond a certain limit. 

-Badger

And so begins Toad’s intervention. 

But Toad, like all of us, resists change by force. What is the meaning of this gross outrage? he howls when Badger orders the car away and tells him to take off his ridiculous riding clothes. Whereupon the animals take them off him by force. They had to lay Toad out on the floor, kicking and calling all sorts of names, before they could get to work properly. Then the Rat sat on him, and the Mole got his riding clothes off him bit by bit, and they stood him up on his legs again. A good deal of his blustering spirit seemed to have evaporated with the removal of his fine panoply. Now that he was merely Toad, and no longer the Terror of the Highway, he giggled feebly and looked from one to the other appealingly, seeming to quite understand the situation.

He is eventually brought to tears by Badger’s grand speeches, and he seems to be his soft-hearted, affectionate self again. The animals congratulate themselves on an intervention well done; however, Toad eventually flips back into his attitude of bedevilment, and defies them. At this point they attempt a forced rehab, and keep up guard day and night. But Toad, knowing his friends’ faults and weaknesses well, manages an escape. He commences on his heedless way, blind in his addiction. His obsession deepens and worsens, and his pursuit of it becomes more and more reckless. In his last grand overreach, his final act of glory, he imagines that he is Toad once more, Toad at his best and his highest, Toad the terror, fulfilling his instincts, living his hour, reckless of what might come to him.

And then his reckless thrill of self-destruction is brought to a sudden end. Then the brutal minions of the law fell upon the hapless Toad and he was taken to a dank, dark dungeon, where he was no longer a cheery, wealthy rogue, but vile Toad, a criminal of deepest guilt. He is now a prisoner in the remotest dungeon of the best-guarded keep of the stoutest castle in all the length and breadth of Merry England. 

Toad eventually attempts escape from prison, and with both painful and jolly escapades he arrives home, only to find his ancestral home ruined. Toad Hall has been overrun by the Stoats and the Weasels, who were only too happy to move in when they heard of his imprisonment. Toad and his friends band together in one final venture in an attempt to reinstate Toad once again as master of Toad Hall. 

Will it be as it was before? Or is this season of their lives lost, never to be the same? Can we go home again? 

Every writer’s losses and questions spill over onto the pages he writes. I see in this story Grahame’s obsession with a too-short childhood, and this colored both this story and his life. But we understand this. We all fall into the temptation to be dictated by our pasts, in one form or another. In our longing for home, and for childhood’s dreams. For those moments lying beside the running water, lost in a world of possibility that was both beautiful and impossible, yet in our memory it lives on perfect and untarnished.

And through it all I see an attempt of a father to speak of life to his son. 

Alastair was a frustration and enigma to his father. Yet Alastair’s temperament mirrored his father’s, and the son’s unspoken longings for emotional closeness and understanding echoed his father’s own longings. I suspect Grahame understood his son all too well. Their’s was not a happy ending. Alastair died a quick death, by his own hands, at the age of twenty. Grahame’s was a slow death, bringing him to the end of his years a lonely and sad old man. Their tragedy brushes the story with sadness. But in it I see a little boy and his father caught in a moment in time. Both unable to express what they really need from each other, and from life. Both feeling lost in a world that values extroversion and success. Both longing for the bonds of friendship and acceptance that mark this story. Both carrying generational wounds, they disappear together into the magical world of The Riverbank, and for a moment, perhaps, they understand each other. 

But simply put – and the reason children love it – this is a story of friendship. By himself in his little underground home, Mole was a lonely little mole making his own lonely way in the world. But in community, in friendship, his life is brushed with colors and warmth. He finds a place for himself in a previously-unknown world, and yet he understands the anchoring value of home and roots, as is described so beautifully in the chapter titled Dulce Domum, or Sweetly at Home.

Some reviewers are offended by the political climate and the culture of Edwardian England. All I have to say is this – it is part of our collective history. To avoid it leaves us ignorant and unbalanced. The beautiful nuances of human nature are the same no matter which political climates we find ourselves in.

The Wind in the Willows is a slow, sweet story with beautiful, elegant writing. It shows a clear picture of human nature in all its cowardice and courage and self-sacrifice. It shows the sharp edges of differing personalities, and the way friendship blurs these sharp edges and makes us all a little better. It speaks the unspoken longing, in the face of all that is cruel in the world, to disappear to a small home along the riverbank and spend one’s days simply messing about in boats.

When tired at last, he sat on the bank,
while the river still chattered on to him,
a babbling procession of the best stories in the world,
sent from the heart of the earth
to be told at last to the insatiable sea.

-The Wind in the Willows

A note to those of you with young readers: My son loved hearing me read this book to him, as he’s too young to read it himself yet. But if you’d like to introduce a beginning reader to The Wind in the Willows, the Easy Reader Classics from Memoria Press have several beginner reader books featuring stories from The Wind in the Willows. They are simply written, with beautiful illustrations, and they are a wonderful way of encouraging children to read on their own.