The Golden Age (Kenneth Grahame, 1895) (The Penguin Kenneth Grahame, 1/3)

I'm sure everyone's seen or read something that makes use of the idyllic, semi-generic rural childhood setting.  You know the one, where everyone lives in either big manor houses or small cottages, and the children run around willy-nilly and get into all kinds of mischief and live in a half-fantasy world where their imaginations get them into all sorts of wild adventures with no real risk involved, and just across that hedge over there is a farmer's field and there's a little village down the way and the grown-ups are all serious and lack proper senses of humor because they just don't understand what's really important in life the way that the children do.

So, what happens if we take that setting, drop a few children into it to have the requisite low-stakes adventures, but then write it with an adult sensibility and sense of diction?

Well, we get some of Kenneth Grahame's works, for one.

Grahame got his start as a writer with pieces written for newspapers in the late Victorian era, a combination of short stories and meditations on life and the simple joys that one can find.  These were mostly collected in a volume called Pagan Papers, which is not at hand for me to read but I may be seeing if I can track it down later.  One particular one of these meditations, "The Olympians," focused on the difference between the priorities of the adults who raised him after his mother died, and those of he and his siblings who were in their care.  After one of his editors asked him to write more like that, he put out several of the 17 stories that made up The Golden Age, though most of the book was original at the time of its publication.  A sequel, Dream Days, followed; I'll be writing about that later.

So, what is it that we're actually looking at, here?  In large part, it's a very grounded set of tales about five siblings growing up in the English countryside and the little games they play with one another.  It's never fully laid-out, but I got the sense when reading that the oldest of the group was maybe nine or ten years old.  There's a sort of timeless sense about it all; the narrator (who seems positioned as a self-insert of the author, without any name ever given) seems to be the third of the five.  The stories seem to take place across about a year and a half of time, shifting lazily from season to season.  Some feature the narrator alone, others some or all of the group, but there's always a touch of ethereal quality to the events, as if the imaginations are layered atop reality in a way that makes them have a slight ability to actually be interacted with.

The central theme, though, is the disconnect between the children and adults.  Grahame's narrator is very in tune with nature, and knows that the most important parts of his world are the ones that he directly interacts with, whether that's the wind, guiding him through the countryside in the first story, or the small rivers that lead to several adventures directly into fantasy; sneaking under a fence in one case leads to a quiet Downton Abbey-like garden, which must clearly belong to a sleeping princess (who is, of course, on hand), while temporarily stealing a farmer's boat in order to play at Jason and the Argonauts leads to the discovery of a young Medea of sorts in the garden of another nearby manor.

There's a sense to the whole piece that Grahame is lamenting the loss of innocence that comes with growing up.  The children as a group get up to all kinds of mischief, but there are also moments where the reality of the world somewhat gets the best of them; one story features their governess leaving, and the children don't seem to quite understand why they feel so sad about it, and the final story deals with the looming departure to boarding school of the oldest of the siblings, with a conclusion that implies that the change from child to 'Olympian' adult comes with that separation from the childhood setting.

Not all adults fit into this 'Olympian' mode, however.  One chapter, which starts as a meditation on the old Roman roadways that still cross the British countryside, features a discussion between the narrator and an artist who seems clearly like-minded, regarding a fantastic 'perfect' city that's where all the spare suitors in fairy tales and minor knights in Arthurian legends end up after the stories; in another case, the 'sleeping beauty' garden's princess has already been 'awoken' by a suitor, but both of them are more than willing to play along with the young boy's surety that he's walked into a fairy tale.  Another time, it goes the opposite way; the children getting into mischief in the night convinces the new tutor that the house is haunted and sends him fleeing the next morning, to sell his story to a supernatural-themed tabloid.

It's clear from reading this that Grahame felt that there's something important in a child's experience of the world, and the sensibility that comes from a more innocent view of the world and what's really important.  Fairyland lies behind every hedge, around every corner, if one simply knows where to look.  The fact that this book was a particular favorite of both Theodore Roosevelt and Kaiser Wilhelm II (in the latter case, it was the only book, aside from the Bible, that he kept on his private yacht) perhaps speaks to something of the personalities of both leaders.  There's a lot to be said for keeping a bit of that sense of whimsy and wonder; every adult who comes across in a positive way over the course of this book is someone who retains some aspect of that, whether that's playing along with a child's fantasy or simply letting kids be kids.  And really, that seems to be the core message at work here: there's something special about a child's view of the world, and more of us might do well to let a bit of that view in.