★★★★★ A surprisingly grown-up children's book

The Wind in the Willows

Kenneth Grahame

Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows will always be associated in my mind with A.A. Milne's The World of Pooh. My family owned both books, and I read them at about the same age, probably when I was still in single digits. Furthermore, ours had obviously been published together. The binding was identical, except that The World of Pooh was bound in tan cloth approximately the same color as Pooh himself, while The Wind in the Willows was bound in green cloth. What's more, both were illustrated by Ernest Shephard. (I will never be reconciled to the Disney versions of the Pooh characters.)

This association is strange, because in fact they are quite different books. The World of Pooh is, intentionally, a childish work. The Wind in the Willows is a children's book, but it is not childish. The characters are ostensibly small wild animals -- Mole, Rat, Badger, Otter, and the infamous Toad-- living a civilized life on the river, on the edge of the uncivilized Wild Wood. But in reality they think like grown-ups and have very grown-up concerns. They form a little self-policing society. I imagine it is modeled on Grahame's circle of friends, although I have not the tiniest shred of evidence to support that suspicion. They nevertheless feel very familiar to me, now at the age of 68. But even when I was a barely literate kid, they felt familiar to me, not because they were like my own friends, but because they were like the grown-ups who plagued us.

This doesn't sound very interesting or attractive, but in fact The Wind in the Willows was one of my favorite books at that time. Perhaps it served as a sort of key to the world of the incomprehensible grown-ups.

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