Book Review
The 100 best novels / No 38 / The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908)
February 6, 2016
It is an incredibly long time since I last read ‘The Wind in the Willows’, and I returned to it with some nervousness – would it have retained its wit and charm? Unsurprisingly, it is one of those novels which contains depths unnoticed in earlier reads. It is simply wonderful, and if you have a couple of hours spare there are few ways of spending them that would be more rewarding than on the riverbank with Ratty, Mole, Toad, and Badger.
In an interesting article in the Guardian books column back in 2009, ‘Wild Waters are upon us’, Rosemary Hill observed that ‘The Wind in the Willows’ was written within a few years of Beatrix Potter’s ‘The Tale of Peter Rabbit’, E.Nesbit’s ‘The Railway Children’, and J.M.Barrie’s ‘Peter Pan’. Together she argues, very persuasively, these children’s stories came to define the Edwardian Era, “as an idyllic last summer bathed in golden sunshine“, in contrast to the developments in the real world, “a decade of social discontent and growing international tension, when the cracks in the British Empire began to show“. This novel captures brilliant a world of largely suburban contentment – the animals co-exist quite comfortably with the human world, all except perhaps Mr Toad, and their occupations – mainly messing about on boats – are those of middle class people with time on their hands. If ‘Willows’ creates a lost Edwardian idyll, rather than portraying it, the novel is however quite clear that this world is under threat, from development, urbanisation, and not least the dreaded car. The car must have been a rare and slightly frightening sight in 1908, but the way Graeme captures the petrol-head obsession of Toad has close parallels to the car worship of today.
