Although I vaguely remember Mole, Ratty, Toad, Mr Badger et al from my childhood, it was reading it to my child that brought it alive. They loved it and lived it – even more so after their first theatre trip to see it performed, aged a little less than three, which led to the unabridged version of the book.


Image: Ratty and Mole on the river (Source.)

We had many boating picnics (imaginary and for real), role-playing various characters, over several years, until The Hobbit and LotR took over (see my review HERE).

As an adult, I don’t much like the book itself (it's too dated, and the twee quasi homo subtext can grate), but I love Shepard’s illustrations and the memories of sharing it with my child.

Books that feed imagination are formative, whatever their flaws.


Image: Toad, ready to take the wheel of a motor car (Source.)

A wonderful story about individuality, friendship, nature and life. Mole, Ratty, Badger and Toad are a pure delight through their numerous escapades involving motor car envy, messing about in boats, picnic pleasures and untimely snow storms. Set in the English country lanes, woods and riverbanks. It is a beautifully written little gem.

PART TWO OF PETER JACKSON'S THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS (CONCLUSION)

[Night. Toad Hall, interior. STEPHEN FRY as TOAD and ORLANDO BLOOM as BADGER are in the middle of a wild melée with numerous STOATS and WEASELS.]

BADGER: It's no good, Toad! There's too many of them! [With a blow of his cudgel, he knocks a WEASEL into the open fire.]

TOAD: We can hold them off, Badger old chap!

[EVANGELINE LILLY as a HOT BADGER-BABE crashes through the window and lands next to them.]

BADGER: [Choked with emotion] You came back.

HOT BADGER-BABE: Badger.

[For a moment, they just look at each other. A STOAT tries to take advantage of their inattention to sneak up on them from behind, but TOAD grabs a carving knife from the dining table and wittily disembowels him.]

BADGER: Thanks, Toad.

[TWO MORE STOATS have meanwhile advanced on TOAD. BADGER amusingly decapitates them with a single blow of his cudgel.]

TOAD: Nice work, Badger!

[Dissolve to the pantry, where MARTIN FREEMAN as MOLE is frantically mixing something in a large bowl, assisted by ELIJAH WOOD as RATTY.]

MOLE: Okay, that's the sugar. Now we need some fertilizer.

RATTY: Will this horse-shit do?

MOLE: It'll have to.

[He dumps it into the bowl, pours in the contents of a bottle, then accidentally drops everything on the floor.]

RATTY: Oh dear--

[A deafening explosion. Clouds of smoke cover everything, then we see letters superimposed on them saying PART THREE COMING NEXT CHRISTMAS.]

A REPRESENTATIVE OF THE ESTATE OF KENNETH GRAHAME: What have we done?

Lavishly described meandering adventures of the mild nature.

The Wind in the Willows has an intrinsically English flavor. The characters are happy to live their ordinary lives with only a hint of interest in the wider world. Too strong of an adventurous spiritedness is considered uncouth. Such hearty frivolity as Toad's is frowned upon to the utmost!

Unfortunately this goes for the author, too. Kenneth Grahame's plots are not terribly gripping due to their lack of depth. He seems pleased rather to spend the time describing a pleasant boating holiday down the river. If it wasn't for the scenes with the Wonderful Toad, the Fantastic Toad there would be very little excitement indeed.

However, it is the bond of friendship and the love of homely pleasures that entices us to read on. I gave it 3 stars, because I liked The Wind in the Willows. No more and no less, and let's keep it as nice and cozily close to uncontroversial as that, shall we?

The Wind in the Willows is widely accepted as a children's novel. To some extent, this classification is justified since its story consists of the adventures of a Mole, a Rat, a Badger, and a stubborn toad. But the line is drawn there. The story may be told in the manner of animal adventures, but thematically it goes deeper catering more to the young adult/adult audiences.

The interesting characters of the Mole, the Rat, the Badger, and the stubborn Toad, and their adventures teach the values of friendship, loyalty, dire consequences of greed, pride and vanity, and more importantly the value of protecting and blending in with nature. When Kenneth Grahame wrote it, the United Kingdom was under an industrial and technological revolution. Industrial and technological progress marred the established agricultural economy. It also threatened the people's natural relationship with nature. If the story is privy to his perspective, one can feel Grahame's disapproval of these new developments that threatened the natural environment and its relationship with the people.

The adventures of these different characters were interesting in themselves. However, my enjoyment of the story rose from the different personalities of the characters (especially the exasperating toad) and the thematic expositions that Grahame had worked on. Credit must go to him for the successful creation of this complex enterprise of writing a story for children to enjoy and adults to ponder.

I probably overuse the phrase "charming and delightful" to describe the books I read, but it absolutely fits the bill here. Mole, Rat, Badger, and Toad make a truly fantastic four. I love the adventures (and shenanigans!), the prose, the humor, the beauty, the friendship.

I highly recommend all the Literary Life Podcast episodes for this book, but especially the episode covering the "problematic" Chapter 7, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn"!

I never read this classic as a child, and then my mother said she was going to read it for the first time, so we did a kind of buddy read (I say, kind of, I was only halfway when she finished..).

The writing is absolutely gorgeous, appealing to all the senses, painting very vivid and poetic pictures of nature. It does sometimes drown a bit in this same poetry, getting lost in it, the pace grinding to a halt.

It feels very of its time - there's a real early 1900s UK idea of class, with the weasels getting beaten out of Toad's stately home, like the filthy commoners they are.

Not a lot really happens, except perhaps to Toad, who is said to be a 'good-hearted animal', but to me seems a bit of a dick.

My favourite character is Mole, he's unassuming and sweet (or he knows his place, if looking through a class-based lense), although he becomes slightly sinister during the freeing of Toad's house, showing a little bit too much glee at beating the weasels. And when he gets to lord it over a small group of defeated weasels and order them into manual labour, I fear what choices Mole would have made were he alive in 1930s Germany.

So fun and whimsical!

Ok, second attempt at a review after the damn interwebs ate my last one. Luckily I’m composing this one offline first.

To me Kenneth Grahame’s _The Wind in the Willows_ is a particularly fine novel. It’s a children’s story and normally that would get my back up. I’m generally not a big fan of children’s lit or YA, and to add to this I didn’t even read this book as a child and thus have the requisite rose-coloured glasses to lend credence to my love for the story. Somehow, however, this tale of the adventures of four animal friends in an idealized and idyllic Edwardian English countryside resonated deeply with me. I think part of this has to do with the deft hand Grahame shows in the creation of his characters: shy amiable Mole, courageous and resolute Ratty (that’s Water Rat by the bye), gruff but stalwart Badger and, last but certainly not least, frivolous and vain Toad, all partake of elements of archetype and yet are never fully defined by it, they manage to emerge as characters in their own right. The setting too seems to straddle the line between generic and specific. The animal friends are constantly travelling against a background whose very names are emblematic: the River, the Wildwood, the Town and yet when we come to their homes we could not wish to find more congenial or personal places of the heart.

Our tale (or perhaps I should say tales) begins as the shy Mole first pokes his nose out from his underground home to be presented with a newly discovered wider world he approaches with awe and wonder. I wouldn’t quite say that Mole is the main character of the stories that follow (though he is always a significant part of them), but I’ve always had a soft spot for him and enjoy seeing Grahame’s idealized English meadows, woods and countryside through his amiable eyes. Toad would probably be the more likely candidate, certainly for a good portion of the stories which concentrate on his adventures: a life-loving jester of a character with more money than brains always looking out for the next fad that is of course the fulfillment of his true heart’s desire…yet again. Indeed, keeping tabs on their friend and trying to hammer some good animal sense into his soft head is one of the major tasks the other characters must undertake in many of these tales. Grahame’s pacing is excellent, at times meandering with a leisurely pace from a boating foray on the River to spring-cleaning a much-loved home, and at others moving at breakneck speed to escape from prison or reclaim an ancestral home from dangerous enemies. Thus we follow our friends as they learn about their world and each other and I cannot say that there are many more enjoyable companions to be had for such a venture.

I’ve seen arguments online that these stories are somewhat parochial and insular: whenever the world outside of the hedgerows intrudes it is usually either a dangerous temptation or a destructive force. I can’t really argue with this, but does all literature need to celebrate the novel and the strange? Isn’t there a place for the well-loved hearth and a joyous homecoming? _The Wind in the Willows_ is nothing if not a celebration of the comfortable and the familiar, a paen for a world and a type of beauty fading away. There may be good reasons for why it had to die out, but I would argue that there is still value in remembering it. When I try to put my finger on what it is about this book that so captures my imagination and elevates it from being merely a tale about talking animals within the context of a long-dead worldview I think that Christopher Milne, son of the author of _Winnie the Pooh_, may have said it best when he talked of “those chapters that explore human emotions – the emotions of fear, nostalgia, awe, wanderlust.” It is these parts of the book that speak directly to my heart and examine the wider aspects of the human spirit.

Dość krindżowa bajka do poduszki, mdłe dialogi, nijaka fabuła.
Pół życia marzyłem, by to przeczytać - cóż, zawiodłem się

This is a 3.5 star read.

On the whole I felt this was a little disjointed. It seemed like a collection of tales of the characters rather than one complete story. Still a lot of fun to read after all these years.

This was my son's favourite book. He was forever putting skirts of mine over his head and filling a basket with dirty laundry wandering around the house (with his father aiding and abetting him) saying he was Toad the washerwoman.

It looks like a lovely idyll of a small society of animals who live around the riverbank and have to put up with Toad whose money and grandiose schemes make him the dominant and eccentric character. Everyone loves the book and no one notices what is wrong with it.

What's wrong is everyone is male, there are no female animals, just a society of men. An idyll of an ideal society

Well not quite 'no one'. It has been written by Professor Hunt, Cardiff University, among others, that the book is a gay manifesto, and that Grahame, who married late, only lived with his wife and son at weekends. In the week sharing a London flat with Walford Grahame Robertson, a gay artist and both were friends with Oscar Wilde and moved in his society. Professor Hunt says, "That the book is all about male-on-male friendships – and highlights lines such as a bit about Mole and Ratty ‘tumbling between the sheets in great joy and contentment.’"

I wonder if the book had been written in more liberal times it would still have been just stories about males living together? Either way, it's a really great book, and not at all flawed by the omission of females.

Some reviews take a while to formulate. This one around 20 years... lol