The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

(Book Review)

My History With This Book

As a child, I was raised on Disney cartoons and The Disney Channel, so my primary impression of this story is through the Disney movie The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad.  

I know that this is one of Disney's less-remembered animated movies, but, for my money, the Disney version of The Battle for Toad Hall is some of the best animated slapstick that classic Disney ever produced.  

But as great as these scenes are, they of course give a false-impression of the book.  If you go into the book expecting a face-paced story with lots of action... oh boy, are you going to be in for an adjustment!

(Incidentally, since I'm hanging out with a lot of British friends these days, I might add I've discovered that there was a TV show based on The Wind and the Willows that was on British TV in the 1980s, and for British people around my age it was this TV show that is their primary impression of The Wind and the Willows, not the Disney movie.)

My mother at one point bought me a copy of The Wind in the Willows book, but I never got more than a few pages into it.

Why I Read This Book Now

          Aside from the fact that this is one of those classic books that’s been on my to-read list for decades now, there were a couple things that pushed this book to my attention recently.

            A couple brief excerpts from this book are featured on the audio book anthology 1000 Years of Laughter  which I’ve been listening to, and I decided I liked the humor.

            And then, somehow in my Internet wanderings, I came across this interview with Guillermo del Tor, where he was talking about how he pulled out of the Disney movie project: "It was a beautiful book, and then I went to meet with the executives and they said, 'Could you give Toad a skateboard and make him say, 'radical dude' things,' and that's when I said, 'It's been a pleasure...'" .  I decided I wanted to read the book and find out why he thought it was so beautiful.

            The final reason is that I was going on a beach trip with a few friends, and I needed a short, light read that I could kick back at the beach with, and finish off in a couple days, and this seemed to fit the bill perfectly.

Children’s Book or Adult’s Book

         I’d be curious to hear about other people’s experience of this book.  Did you read it as a child, or as an adult, and what age did you think this book was most appropriate for?  Do me a favor and leave a comment if you’ve already read this book.

            In my case, my mother actually gave me a copy of this book when I was a child (around 4th grade I think) and for years it just sat on my bookshelf mocking me.  I tried several times to read it, but could never get past the first few pages.  It was just so boring and slow moving.

            Now that I’m an adult, I have a lot more patience, and I can easily put up with the long descriptions of natural settings or domestic life or daily animal habits.  But as a child I lacked this patience.

            The style of the book is episodic with many different chapters containing separate stories.  (The exception being the stories involving Toad, most of which happen near the end.) The stories in the beginning chapters are very simple: Mole meets Rat and has his first trip down the river, Mole and Rat get lost in the woods for a while until they find Badger’s house, Mole gets homesick and re-visits his old house, et cetera.

            There’s perhaps a temptation to imagine that simple stories are ideal for children, but I think the contrary is true.  Children, perhaps especially young boys, need a lot of fast paced action to hold their attention.  If you want to see the ideal book for a ten-year old boy, check out Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs.  It’s all non-stop action, and very little time wasted on describing anything. 

            The Wind in the Willows, however, is the antithesis of Burroughs.  It’s very little action, and a lot of description.

            The publisher’s introduction to my paperback (Jane Yolen, 1988, Tor Books) tackles this awkwardness head on, and admits that parts of the book are more suited for middle-age than childhood.  The book was apparently written as part of a middle-aged crisis for Kenneth Grahame when he was feeling very nostalgic about his childhood.  It was combined with a series of stories about Mr. Toad that Kenneth Grahame had been telling his son, and the Mr. Toad stories are much more child friendly.

            But, although the adventures of Mr. Toad are what everyone remembers from this book, the bulk of the book is actually filled with nostalgic descriptions of the English countryside and domestic life in rural England.

            I can appreciate the beauty of all of this now, but I would never give this book to a child.

            A couple of the chapters are even overtly about middle-aged crises.  In one chapter, Rat, who has lived all his life in peaceful domestic bliss on the same river, encounters another rodent who has sailed over the world and has stories from every port town.  Rat has a moment of crisis in which he wonders if he’s missing out on life by not travelling and having adventures, and he almost packs up his things and sets out to see the world before he is eventually talked out of it by Mole, who brings him back down to earth by talking about English pastoral life.  “Casually, then, and with seeming indifference, the Mole turned his talk to the harvest that was being gathered in, the towering wagons, and their straining teams, the growing ricks, and the large moon rising over bare acres dotted with sheaves. He talked of the reddening apples around, of the browning nuts, of jams and preserves and the distilling of cordials; till by easy stages such as these he reached midwinter, its hearty joys and its snug home life, and then he became simply lyrical.” (p. 145-146)

            There’s another chapter when Rat and Mole encounter the nature god Pan.  It’s a beautifully written passage (and often very beautifully illustrated [LINK HERE]), but the primary emotion is a sense of painful nostalgia for something lost.  Again, it’s not something I would recommend to a child.

            On the other hand, the pastoral scenes in this book are intercut with the adventures of Mr. Toad, and the Mr. Toad parts are obviously written for a child.  They are much faster paced and adventurous, and they also follow a child’s sense of logic.  (After Mr. Toad escapes from jail, he is a fugitive from the law and pursued by the police, but all of this is abruptly dropped from the story as soon as he gets back home.  In the logic of this book, it appears once you get back to your home base you win and the police just go home.  Also, the stouts and the weasels are driven out of Toad Hall by a surprise attack, but for some reason there is never any question of the stouts and weasels re-grouping for any sort of counter-attack, despite the fact that they have superior numbers.   Once they are driven out of Toad Hall the first time, the game appears to be over.)

            To quote from the publisher’s afterward:

            “The Wind in the Willows is not one book but three.  There is the contemplative, pastoral, sentimental, and nostalgic story of those best of old-fashioned friends Rat and Badger and Mole.  There is the rollicking adventure of the irrepressible and trouble-minded toad.  and there is the mystical, magical, even visionary and dreamlike, allegory of Pan with his Pipes at the Gates of Dawn.  Some readers prefer the story of friendship, some prefer the fast-paced adventure; some prefer the dream.” (Jane Yolen, 1988).

            So, although parts of The Wind and the Willows are written for children, and parts for adults, I think on the whole the book is best read by adults.  Adults can enjoy the children’s sections of the book a lot better than children can handle the adult parts.

            But that’s just my opinion.  Let me know what you thought of this book.

            While out on the beach, I did a quick survey of my group of friends.  One person said he actually had read this book as a child.  Even though the book had bored him, he said he was just such a voracious reader as a child that he read anything and everything he could get his hands on, and he plowed on through the book anyway despite the boredom.

            I suspect this is the only kind of child that can read this book.  I was very much the opposite kind of child though.  I liked reading, but it was a slow and laborious process for me, and if the story didn’t move quickly enough, I was very easily distracted by other books which did move quicker. And that’s what happened to me with The Wind in the Willows. 

            My other friends had never even read this book, but had a lot of nostalgia for the characters and the story nonetheless because they remembered it from the various TV shows.  (In my case, I have a lot of nostalgia for the Disney version (W), but from my British friends I learned there was also a TV show based on The Wind in the Willows that ran for several years in Britain (W).) 

            The fact that the characters from this story have worked their way into our collective childhood nostalgia, regardless of whether we read the book or not, is perhaps an indication that this book does have some level of strong appeal to children after all.

The Review

          All that being said, let me put aside the question of who this is for, and simply focus on how enjoyable it was for me to read now at my present stage in life.

            And the answer is: quite enjoyable.  This is a quick read which I easily finished off in a couple of days, and it’s a thoroughly charming.  It has a lot of cute scenes describing animal society, very detailed descriptions of life in the Edwardian English countryside, and it can be quite funny.

          Having been forewarned by the publisher’s introduction that a lot of the book was simply nostalgia about the English countryside, I allowed myself to get in the mood and allowed the author to paint his picture of the simple joys of the river and the forest, and the joys of a cozy home.

            The sections describing home life in Edwardian England were interesting as well.  In this day and age of electric heating, it’s easy to forget how important the fireside was to Edwardians in the winter time, and there are a lot of passages describing how comfortable the fire place was, and describing animals talking to each other while warming themselves by the fireside, or drinking warm ale by the fire.

            I also enjoyed the humor of the book.  And to illustrate this, I’ll indulge myself  by quoting my favorite passage.

My Favorite Passage

          The Rat was sitting on the river bank, singing a little song.  He had just composed it himself, so he was very taken up with it, and would not pay proper attention to Mole or anything else.  Since early morning he had been swimming in the river in company with his friends the ducks.  And when the ducks stood on their heads suddenly, as ducks will, he would dive down and tickle their necks just under where their chins would be if ducks had chins, till they were forced to come to the surface again in a hurry, spluttering and angry and shaking their feathers at him, for it was impossible to say quite all you feel when your head is under water. At last they implored him to go away and attend to his own affairs and leave them to minds theirs. So the Rat went away, and sat on the river bank in the sun, and made up a song about them, which he called

“DUCKS’ DITTY”

All along the backwater,

Through the rushes tall,

Ducks are a-dabbling,

Up tails all!

Ducks’ tails, drakes’ tails,

Yellow feet a-quiver,

Yellow bills all out of sight

Busy in the river!

Slushy green undergrowth

Where the roach swim—

Here we keep our larder,

Cool and full and dim.

Every one for what he likes!

We like to be

Heads down, tails up

Dabbling free!

High in the blue above

Swifts whirl and call—

We are down a-dabbling

Up tails all!

            “I don’t know that I think so very much of that little song, Rat,” observed the Mole cautiously.  He was no poet himself and didn’t care who knew it; and he had a candid nature.

            “Nor don’t the ducks, neither,” replied the Rat cheerfully. “They say, ‘Why can’t fellows be allowed to do what they like when they like and as they like, instead of other fellows sitting on banks and watching them all the time and making remarks and poetry and things about them?  What nonsense it all is!’ That’s what the ducks say.”

            “So it is, so it is,” said the Mole, with great heartiness.

            “No, it isn’t!” cried the Rat indignantly.

            “Well then, it isn’t, it isn’t,” replied the Mole soothingly…..

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The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame: Book Review