The Wind in the Willows
Posted: Sat Sep 22, 2018 7:28 pm
Certainly one of my all time favourite books, I was inspired to read Graham's classic 'childrens' novel after hearing an Oxford don say on the radio, that if one wanted to get a sense of the 'feel' of Edwardian Britain, there was no better starting point than this book. Probably in my twenties at the time, I'd of course heard of the story, knew that it involved the adventures of some river animals and a toad, but that was about it. Finding the book shortly thereafter in a flea market or somewhere, I picked it up for a song and the rest is history. I was quite simply staggered at how good the story was, how engaging the characters (particularly of course the Toad) and the depths of feeling to which these simple tales, told in a meandering journey over a central story arc, could take me.
Talking with my wife earlier about how I believe the demarcation between children's, adolescent and adult novels was in my opinion a nebulous one, I had cause to refer to the book as an example, and had something of an epiphany that I think worth sharing. What I think, makes Graham's book so brilliant, such a work of high literature is not that the story can 'be read at different levels' by children and adults, with metaphor's and the like revealing themselves to adult audiences that are hidden from young readers. On the contrary, the work's true genius is in that it is exactly the same story that is read by adults and children alike, but that the emotional resonance that the writing is capable of producing does not 'plateau', but rather continues to increase into adulthood and indeed onward through life as experience furnishes one with the tools to mine it. The sheer power of the writing exhibited in The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and Dulce Domum is in my opinion, of as high an order as anything written in adult fiction (or at least anything I have ever encountered) and would bring a lump to the throat of even the hardest of nuts to crack, and if you haven't yet experienced it then I recommend it as the very next book you read. In fact I recommend it in exactly the same way even if you have!
Talking with my wife earlier about how I believe the demarcation between children's, adolescent and adult novels was in my opinion a nebulous one, I had cause to refer to the book as an example, and had something of an epiphany that I think worth sharing. What I think, makes Graham's book so brilliant, such a work of high literature is not that the story can 'be read at different levels' by children and adults, with metaphor's and the like revealing themselves to adult audiences that are hidden from young readers. On the contrary, the work's true genius is in that it is exactly the same story that is read by adults and children alike, but that the emotional resonance that the writing is capable of producing does not 'plateau', but rather continues to increase into adulthood and indeed onward through life as experience furnishes one with the tools to mine it. The sheer power of the writing exhibited in The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and Dulce Domum is in my opinion, of as high an order as anything written in adult fiction (or at least anything I have ever encountered) and would bring a lump to the throat of even the hardest of nuts to crack, and if you haven't yet experienced it then I recommend it as the very next book you read. In fact I recommend it in exactly the same way even if you have!
Hi Linna!
And I've always especially loved Toad's final realisation...of the entirely new form of arrogance that being humble can provide. 
Theres so much to delight in .. with the WITWs.