Yatterings

The Wind in the Willows is 100 years old this year and Kenneth Grahame still has something to say.

The Telegraph ran a story on the novelist and the book’s creation (though it appears to be a little of a rehash of Alison Prince’s biography, Kenneth Grahame: An Innocent in the Wild Wood (Amazon), which is excellent).

There’s a dark heart to Wind in the Willows, an emptiness in that the riverbank world of Rat and Mole will disappear as soon as you put the book down. Toad has sold everybody out and he sort of knows it. What is very troubling is that we are still in the same world now as then with the loss of the landscape (though by no means are we as sentimental but that’s a very Victorian trait).

Its definitely a book that is worth reading again and celebrating its birthday with a day on the river sometime.