The Wind In The Willows-100

I haven't read this classic, but Salon's Gary Kamiya's tribute to it makes me want to read it, then I can finally understand Mr. Toad's Wild ride at Disneyland:

...and if Mole and Rat are idealized reflections of the grown-up author and his grown-up problems, then Toad is its major key, its glittering color, its childish heart. The combination is audacious and bizarre, but the book's two facets somehow complement each other perfectly. Mole and Rat learn from their mistakes, grasp the meaning of friendship, come to understand their limitations. That's all well and good, but rather grown-up. The antidote to this seriousness is someone who never learns anything, who never understands anything, who never regrets anything, who lives for the moment. The antidote is Toad.

Toad was present at the creation -- in fact, he was the creation. "The Wind in the Willows" started out as bedtime stories Grahame told to his son, Alastair, and the first version was probably only about Toad, according to Green. Toad's story is the one everyone remembers. How could you not? His picaresque adventures, from his unhappy career as a motor-car thief, fraudulent washerwoman and horse trader to the mock-Homeric "Return of Ulysses" chapter in which he and his friends creep through a secret tunnel to surprise the weasels who have usurped his house, appeal to the universal desire to humbug everybody and get away with it, to rise straight to heaven on the gas of one's own ego.

Toad is one of the great comic characters in all of literature, a descendant of the braggart soldiers of Roman literature and the pompous cuckolds of commedia del'arte, the little blowhard brother of Falstaff and Don Quixote. Armed with invincible vanity, a complete lack of impulse control and a remarkably empty head, Toad is the consummate scenery-gobbler, a baked ham on legs who seizes the stage and never lets another character get a word in edgewise. Like cartoon characters who spring magically back to life after they have been folded, spindled and mutilated, Toad's delicious appeal is that he always comes back, as gloriously stupid and lovable as ever: He cannot be anything but Toad. As Grahame told someone who inquired if Toad ever really changed, "Of course Toad never really reformed; he was by nature incapable of it."

Comments

[Sofia]

You couldn't come up with a more... original name for your blog?

[Patrick McCoy]

I started this blog in July of 2003 while living in Tokyo, Japan and before I was aware of the film of the same name.

[Edward Hathway]

Mate, I can't believe you haven't read Wind in the Willows! I on the other hand have read it 4 or 5 times - probably all before I graduated from primary school. I have to disagree with the reviewer about Toad though - quite superficial compared to the others. Ratty probably captured my imagination most (as I remember it). He always seemed like a pretty together character, and he combined a love of the country and country living, the quiet life perhaps, with an underlying desire to travel and see the world - a bit like me I suppose (though the country living will have to be later - it's the big smoke for a few years yet).

[Patrick McCoy]

I can't comment on the book, but I guess you are in essence shaming me into reading it.

[Edward]

I can't honestly say how it would be reading it as an adult.