Kenneth Grahame. The Wind in the Willows (1905)

     Kenneth Grahame. The Wind in the Willows (1905) Rereading this book, I see what charmed me as a child: the camaraderie of Rat and Mole, the sturdiness of Badger (the perfect older brother or uncle), the silliness of Toad, the messing about with boats, the absence of domestic chores (apart from occasional busying oneself with unspecified work), and above all the sense that the narrative voice is telling you the story. I read the book when I was laid up with the mumps at nine or ten years old. I thought it was wonderful, and couldn't make up my mind which of the animal I'd most like to be.
     I also see clearly what I missed as a child: the latent sexuality, curiously gentle in the scene with Pan; the unquestioned class structure, seen from an upper middle-class perspective and unaware of the resentments and tensions below the surface of pleasant service and respectful encounters; and the conflicted attitudes to Toad, which I think express Grahame’s conflicted attitudes to his son Alastair. The structural problems are also obvious: Grahame was not a novelist, but a writer of short stories and anecdotal essays, and this book is structurally a connected set of such works, loosely linked through the adventures of Toad.
     The final chapter, in which Toad is tamed, does not ring true, perhaps because Grahame was expressing a wish for a change in character in Alastair rather than describing him; for that Toad is Alastair is I think quite certain. Whether Alastair saw this and identified with Toad’s self-congratulation and vanity (without of course recognising their silliness) is something I would like to know. I suspect he did: his suicide was I think his way out of Toad’s world. In real life, it’s impossible to change one’s character, the best one can do is to change the way one plays the role. *** (2005)