I honestly don’t know if I had read The Wind in the Willows before listening to the audiobook last week. But, let’s be clear about what that situation implies: I had no illustrations to support the text, and I was coming at it as an adult who has been trained to interact critically with art. So, if you unreservedly love The Wind in the Willows, you may wish to disregard this post.
The perennial classic novel never satisfactorily defines its world, in my opinion. From the start, I was unclear about whether humans existed in this reality. The first chapter refers to the characters as people (I swear it does!), only to switch to ‘animals’ starting in Chapter 2. A few chapters in, when Badger is introduced, he mentions humans directly. At that point, it’s unclear what relation humans and animals have to each other, but it seems like a segregated one. Finally, in the last third of the book, Toad interacts with humans. Their clothes fit him. They mistake him for a human. They accept his being a toad. So, my first question is “What is this world where a toad walks like a man?” Are all the creatures the same size? Is the mole six feet tall? It’s monstrous.
My second observation is that the prose is beautiful. Kenneth Grahame can clearly write, and his style is perfectly suited to his material. For me, skillful writing covers a multitude of sins, and listening to his words was often true rapture.
However—and here comes my main complaint—there are two separate books going on here. One is rhapsodic and mythic, with appearances by Pan (whom the Rat and Mole worship) and literary allusions and meditations on migration and instinct in the form of a mysterious world-ranging stranger with Pied Piper tendencies. The other is a humorous adventure about that incorrigible Mr. Toad. The two threads use different linguistic styles and are woven together somewhat indiscriminately so that the timelines don’t appear to match up at all. Seasons pass almost at random.
These two books could have easily been just that: two books, even if they were bound in one volume. One is pastoral, philosophical, and metaphysical. One is about insulting washerwomen and stealing motorcars. Entwined as they are, the effect is jarring and inconsistent. Separated, they would become two types of stories from the same world but rooted in their protagonists’ ways of being. Sometimes it felt like a chapter of Virginia Woolf followed by a chapter of Robert Louis Stevenson (or choose your own two authors). Yes, many writers can merge the two modes, such as Chesterton, who writes cheeky adventure with very serious metaphysical outcomes. But it doesn’t work here.
Just scan the chapter titles to see the dichotomy. You’ve got “Dolce Domum,” “Wayfarers All,” “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” “Like Summer Tempests Came His Tears,” and “The Return of Ulysses” intermingled with “Mr. Toad,” “Toad’s Adventures,” and “The Further Adventures of Toad.”
It is fun to identify archetypal characters (“Oh, he’s such a Mole!” or “I’m certainly a Badger”…which is true.), and it’s lovely to hear the (yes) slightly homoerotic Rat and Mole enjoying the life of the river bank. But it’s a different kind of fun to listen to Toad sing about his renown for the fifth time. And when the two storylines are forced together at the end (as they must be under this construction), a heavy value judgment is placed on the two modes of fun, and Toad undergoes the least believable transformation this side of The Taming of the Shrew, which sadly is not about a rodent at all, be it six centimeters or six feet.
This is an excellent example of a work that is neither Good nor Bad but simply imperfect, with strengths and weaknesses like any human. Or animal.