Passing (Nella Larsen, 1929)

...wow.

For a thin volume like Passing, which is all over in a mere 120 pages, there's a lot of stuff to chew on, and I know from the start that I'm probably not especially qualified to talk about much of what's going on here.  There's this thing called white privilege, you see, and, well...  Yeah.

It's probably best to start with the title, "Passing".  I became most familiar with this particular definition of the verb through the trans* context, where it refers to the act of looking enough like your correct gender that a stranger wouldn't know you're trans*; the term is used here in the earlier racial context, specifically in terms of pale-skinned Black folk who are able to "pass" as being White.  Even people like me, who have no experience of being on the receiving end of racism, can see what the point of that would be, especially in the 1920s, but also, well...  motions at the need for the Black Lives Matter movement to exist

The lead characters in Passing are Irene, a pale Black woman (her skin is described as "olive") who grew up in Chicago but now lives in Harlem; and Clare, similarly pale-skinned, who grew up alongside Irene until her father died, then was shuffled off to live with a couple of White aunts until she got herself married to get out from under their thumbs.  Her husband has no idea she's not pure White, which seems to be rather playing with fire on Clare's part, given that he is incredibly racist.

The book follows a three-act structure, with sections titled "Encounter", "Re-Encounter", and "Finale".  The first is largely a flashback to Irene and Clare's first time encountering each other as adults.  Irene is in Chicago to visit her father and old family friends, and happens to encounter Clare while taking tea at one of the higher-class hotels (choosing to "pass" for that moment).  Clare is so far into her façade that Irene doesn't recognize her, while the reverse is anything but true; it takes a minute of trying to figure out where she might have met this White woman who knows her childhood nickname, and in fact Clare laughing, for Irene to figure it out.

Clare's separation from the Chicago neighborhood (and in fact all of Black culture) is so complete that it has become a sort of forbidden desire to get news, to attend gatherings, to surround herself with the Blackness that she very intentionally left behind.  This becomes particularly problematic when Irene is introduced to Clare's husband, a truly unlikable character who makes it clear that he so proud to have no N-----s in his family and he knows the whole race better than they know themselves because he only believes the negative things he's heard or read.  Irene holds her tongue, but only barely, and decides to cut off contact with Clare altogether.

This would work fine, right up until Clare shows up at her door in Harlem.

The second half of the book deals with Clare's increasing insertion of herself into every Black cultural event she can manage while hiding it from her husband, and the increasing irritation and outright anger that this causes Irene to feel.  Everything builds to a breaking point as Clare's intrusions start to appear to include an illicit romance with Irene's husband... And then Clare's husband encounters and recognises Irene shopping with another Black woman, and, well...  Things do not end well.

Clare is almost a sort of Icarus figure, here.  She has, through a combination of happenstance and pluck, a way to escape the racism inherent in the system; she's unable to resist the temptation to go beyond the safe limits of that escape, though, to try to safely get back the heritage that she has left behind. Ultimately, that hubris, her playing with fire and disregard of the warnings that Irene initially gives her, ends up destroying her.

Irene, meanwhile, knows her limits.  She's playing a somewhat dangerous game of her own, using her children as a way to hold back some of her husband's ambitions, but she's much more careful about it, keeping within her means and only starting to act in less than well-thought-out ways than Clare has pushed her to the breaking point.  The growing resentment in Irene is quite obvious in the narration; while the novel is told in the third person, everything is through Irene's point of view, her head the only one we ever inhabit.

I'm going to admit, there is a lot that I'm sure I missed here.  Even with the usual Penguin Classics introduction and endnotes, I'm about as far from having an understanding of the cultural politics here as it's possible to be.  I can look at what's in the text, and draw my own conclusions, and it does give me some understanding of the author's own viewpoint (Larsen herself being pale-skinned Black), but I'm ultimately not going to be able to appreciate this in the way that a Black reader, or indeed a reader from any outwardly visible minority group, is going to be able to.

My own first-hand experiences as far as "passing" goes are limited to situations where my neurodivergent mind has gotten in the way of what might be considered "normal," and that's usually situations where I'm failing to "pass".  Not having even realized that I'm not neurotypical until relatively recently didn't help, of course.  It does give me at least a little insight into why someone would want to hide aspects of themselves for the sake of making life easier, but it's still not the same experience.

I'm glad that I read this, though.  All too often, the "classics" are overwhelmingly things written by white guys in Europe, and this was a marvelous change of pace, even if it's nowhere near a "feel-good" book.  But then, how many of the books that are really worth reading are?

The Country of the Blind and Other Selected Stories (H.G. Wells, 1894-1915)

A man spontaneously has his visual perception relocated to a site on the opposite side of the planet, but none of his other senses are affected. 

There are four books that are sort of considered the 'core' H.G. Wells works: the novels The War of the Worlds, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and The Invisible Man, and the novella The Time Machine.  This collection, The Country of the Blind and Other Selected Stories, includes precisely zero of those, but I think it might be more interesting exactly because of that.

An object from deep space crashes into Neptune, ignites into a small star, and plunges through the inner solar system on its way to the Sun, causing global disasters and devastation.

What's on display here is a sort of a cross-section of the range of fiction writing that Wells produced, showing just how far beyond his well-known science fiction works he actually went.  The stories aren't designed to have a lengthy or high-stakes plot, for the most part; the general construction of most seems to be that Wells came up with an idea that seemed impossible, then went through the thought of how to make that seem reasonable, and explores it and the ramifications.

A successful politician is haunted by a magical door that he passed through once as a young boy, then passes by every time he encountered it again, despite a desire to return to the mysterious garden beyond the portal.

The most stunning thing about this collection may be the specific variety selected.  We get examples of what seems to be almost pre-figuring many later sub-genres within science fiction, showing just how much the genre as a whole owes to him.  While space travel and the parts of sci-fi that are associated with that are quite outside of what's on display here (the two stories featuring Martians in any context leave them quite contentedly on Mars), we get stories that work with hard science, stories that attempt to prefigure future technology, stories that imagine a culture and investigate how it might interact with others.

A man under the influence of anaesthesia for a surgical procedure, convinced he is going to die while under the knife, experiences Cosmic Zoom.

It's clear that Wells is anything but uninformed, as well.  Perhaps that's not surprising; I have a 1930s  biology textbook that was primarily written by him, in fact the second such textbook that he wrote during his life, which perhaps shows just how studied the man was.  The science at work always feels believable, within Newtonian physics models, and even a story that completely misses the mark on how powered heavier-than-air flight is going to work manages to be a fun read, building up to a giant mechanical bird crashing into and destroying the Royal College of Science in London.

A mountaineer stumbles upon a hidden village of people born for generations without eyes, and learns quickly that the old adage 'In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king' is inaccurate in every possible way.

None of the stories outstay their welcome; each establishes its situation quickly, then progresses through exploring it until the logical endpoint, at which point the story ends.  In cases where further elaboration might be possible, as with a story involving a drug that speeds the taker's body and mind up to a speed one thousand times that of everything around them, future implications are alluded to but left to the reader's imagination, rather than Wells trying to create an encyclopedic examination of the possible effects.

A trip up the Amazon River leads to the verified discovery of a species of oversized, intensely venomous ants with abnormally high intelligence, which are engaging in an actively genocidal invasion of human settlements within the rainforest, and seem to be on the verge of successfully figuring out boats.

This collection honestly has a bit of everything in it.  There are several stories that seem to prefigure themes that H.P. Lovecraft would eventually deal with, alongside rather chilling, entirely-mundane-in-setting crime fiction.  There are visions of the future on display, but the longest story is about a particularly clever Neanderthal in the stone age.  For the most part, Wells always writes with a certain academic voice to his writing, which establishes The story that concludes the book is a rather humorous little tale of an author crossing paths with a devil who was cast out of Hell for abandoning his post at the wrong time, and has no science-fiction content to it at all, but all the same, it's a delightful yarn.  And that's really what one has to look for in a collection like this; a wide range of topics and genres, ending on a somewhat silly note, seems just the way to allow readers to discover how much more than 'just' a science-fiction writer H.G. Wells actually was.

Thankfully, Penguin Classics has 17 books by Wells, both fiction and nonfiction in nature, so I expect I'll be well-served in exploring his other works later on.

The Councillor (E.J. Beaton, 2021)

 

It might be rather less than a surprise to anyone who reads what I have to say, but I like books that give me something to chew on, mentally.  There's a lot to be said for conspiracy themes, then; they're like a literary puzzlebox, where the clues are there if you know what to look for, but you might miss them easily.  It's the same idea as fair-play mysteries, where the reader can see all the pieces after the end, and could perhaps have figured it out before the characters do, just with rather larger stakes for the characters.

As such, it takes a deft hand to not only write a compelling conspiracy thriller, but place it in a fantasy setting that has to be built at the same time.  It says a lot for E.J. Beaton that she managed to pull this off so effectively in her debut novel, The Councillor.

The titular character is Lysande Prior, a scholar in the employ of Sarelin Brey, the Queen of Elira.  We're dealing with a generally low-fantasy setting in this book; medieval technology rules, and what fantastical creatures explicitly existed (such as the chimera seen on the front cover) are established early as having been killed off.  There are 'elementals' referenced as part of the population, who are capable of manipulating the elements at will (we see examples of wind, water, fire, and mind-control is alluded to) but this is a decidedly downtrodden group, forced to live in hiding because their mere existence is considered criminal.  Hello, civil rights issues.

Elira itself is a nation made up of five city-states, each of which has its own leader.  There are significant cultural differences between the states, but in all cases, there's a strong degree of social stratification.  The leaders of all five states are largely hereditary, with a clear aristocratic class ("silver-bloods") maintaining power over the commoners.  There is significant poverty in some parts of the nation, and vigilantism is rampant against elementals, whether or not they have done anything to deserve it, given the state-sanctioned illegal nature of their existence, regardless of whether they even choose to be that way.

The first chapter ends with the assassination of Sarelin, apparently at the whim of Mea Tacitus, the White Queen (who attempted to lead an elemental coup some twenty years prior) and the discovery that, in the event of her death, as she has no heir, she has tasked Lysande with selecting the next person to wear the crown, from among the remaining city-state rulers.  However, an important question remains before the scholar: nobody knows who was able to execute the assassination, and it's important to ensure that the new ruler won't be a puppet of the White Queen.

From there, we're introduced to the leaders of the four other city-states, and Lysande starts trying to decide who would be the best ruler.  This initially seems like it is going to be a selection of 'tests of worthiness', but when further disasters start to threaten the potential rulers (a piece of metal specifically-sized to be a choking hazard hidden in food, a vicious wolf let free in the coliseum when it's not supposed to be... yes, there are blood sports in this setting), she decides that the best option is, instead, to put off selecting a new monarch until the threat of Mea Tacitus is sorted out, placing the four leaders as a ruling council, instead.  She herself is added to the group at the urging of one of the four, as a representative of the fifth city-state, despite having no claim to any throne, and in fact being "low-born".

With this new governmental structure in place, the narrative then shifts to a larger question, that of what the apparently unprovoked attacks on trade ships and attempts on the lives of the council itself might mean.  This is complicated by the introduction of international politics to the mix; one of the two bordering kingdoms believes that their ships are being attacked by Eliran vessels and wants things to be made right, while mercenaries apparently paid by that same country are causing problems.  Lysande's knowledge serves her well, helping her to figure out what's going on, but not quite quickly enough to prevent a diplomatic incident, and not the last one in the narrative.

So, we have a book that's working on several levels.  The primary narrative deals with this conspiracy, where the question of who the traitor in the midst of the council is drives the story forward.  While this makes for the puzzlebox level of the narrative, what drew me to the book in the first place, I found that the far more interesting level was Lysande's development over the course of the work.  She starts out as a devoted servant of Sarelin, who uses the fallen queen's words as a guide for how she should act and how she should lead.  Even at the start of her time as Councillor, while she sees where social ills can be sorted out easily, she's unable to bring herself to take anything more than the smallest steps toward sorting them out.  Her background as a low-born orphan who had it drilled into her head that the appropriate way to express herself is to "restrain, constrain, subdue," anything to keep from getting too many thoughts into her head of acting above her station.  This motto or mantra appears throughout the book, as she grapples with her desire to enact real change to make the lives of all Eliran citizens better, despite her social status.  Her development over the course of the narrative into a genuine leader who is able to easily win the hearts of the populace is interesting to watch, and her slow realization that her low-born status is more a boon than she ever realized.

Definitely an interesting book, and given that the author is already working on a sequel, I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes.  The specific conflict that I spent much of the book expecting to see never quite materialized, but it's clearly still on the horizon, and two of the five city-states haven't been explored on a cultural level yet, so there's plenty of worldbuilding and narrative to see in the future.

The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas père, 1844)

 

A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong. 

 --Edgar Allan Poe, "The Cask of Amontillado" 

Revenge is one of those things that shows up a lot in literature.  Character is wronged, character doesn't feel justice can be served without retribution, character exacts revenge.  It's a common plot, and what determines how worthy of a story it is comes down to the execution.  Thankfully, Alexandre Dumas père did an excellent job of building an incredible revenge plot in The Count of Monte Cristo, enough so that despite the sizable tome (Penguin's edition, without counting the introduction and cultural notes, is 1243 pages long), you would be hard-pressed to find a list of the best revenge novels that doesn't include it.

So, what is it that makes this particular classic stand out so effectively?  I would argue that its secret may be the level of mastery on display in the vengeance exacted by Edmond Dantés upon the men responsible for his life being ruined.  The Count of Monte Cristo is largely taken up with the description of an elaborately-planned plot, designed to force those men past a despair event horizon so that they might know what it's like to have their lives destroyed so utterly... and even beyond that, it's important to him that in the end, those who are destroyed by him are aware of who has brought about their downfalls.

Edmond Dantés is introduced to us as an innocent sailor, caught up in machinations that he is completely ignorant of.  He's on the verge of being made captain of the trading ship he serves on, and he's about to propose to the woman he loves.  However, he has been entrusted with a letter, which he intends to deliver as an honoring of the dead captain's final wishes, unaware that the captain was a devoted Bonapartist and that the message involves the impending return of Napoleon to France.  Unfortunately for Dantés, an attempt by one of his shipmates and a romantic rival to knock him down a peg combines with the intended recipient of that letter being the father of a crown prosecutor, and the end result is the hapless sailor being locked away in a dungeon, with his friends and loved ones unable to find out what has happened to him.

Dantés reaches his despair event horizon roughly four years into his imprisonment; on the verge of killing himself to end the monotonous suffering, he only stops when he hears the telltale sounds of a neighboring prisoner on the verge of tunneling into his cell.  This brings him into a long friendship with Abbé Faria, a well-learned priest who is thought to be mad because of his insistence on knowing the location of a hidden treasure of immense value.  Faria was trying to dig a tunnel out of the prison, but misjudged, instead finding another chamber in the dungeon.

Over the following ten years, teaches Dantés foreign languages, science, mathematics, history... essentially giving him a thorough education in all topics.  They plot an escape together, but this is halted by Faria suffering a stroke, which leaves him half-paralyzed and unable to participate in the escape.  Dantés uses the further tragedy of Faria's death from another stroke to escape from the island prison, switching places with Faria's body and, though surprised to discover that the Chateau d'If has no graveyard (the fate of the bodies of those who die instead being 'tie a cannonball to the feet and throw the body into the deep'), he manages to free himself from the situation and quickly gets himself well away from the island prison, pretending to be a shipwreck survivor and getting himself a position on a passing ship.

At the first chance he gets, Dantés manipulates things to get himself left alone on the volcanic island of Monte Cristo, off the coast of Tuscany.  While there, he searches for, and finds, the vast treasure that Faria told him about, which gives him all the resources he needs to remake himself, and to ensure that his friends, several of whom are in dire straits, are saved from the edge of disaster.  In doing so, he discovers the identities of those who caused the destruction of his old life, and determines that, having done the good he wished to do, it's time to shift toward destroying his enemies.

At this point, we're less than a quarter of the way into the book.  What then ensues over the remaining pages is a long-game revenge, in which Dantés, primarily in the guise of the Count of Monte Cristo but also in at least two other identities through the use of disguises and faked accents, works the kind of exquisite plot that one might expect from a Sherlock Holmes with no scruples, using the past sins of his foes against them, in order to destroy them as thoroughly as possible.  As the story progresses, it becomes clear that two of his targets have enough skeletons in their proverbial closets to utterly destroy them when those skeletons are revealed; the third requires rather more specific efforts, working to siphon off his wealth through market manipulations and carefully-manipulated news reports to bring him to make poor investments.  And in each case, the Count is able to be present at the moment of deepest despair, in order to make sure that they know exactly who was behind their downfalls.

This is a long book.  Part of that is an artifact of the way that Dumas was paid for it; when the work was originally serialized, he was paid by the line.  Of course in a situation like that, one wants to stretch it as far as possible.  But Dumas doesn't use the extra space offered by the length to simply pad things out; while certain parts of the narrative may seem out of place initially, the end result is an intricately woven tapestry of character interactions where very little is extraneous, always instead revealing some important facet of each character's past, personality, or motivations.  A long section in which several characters attend Carnivale in Rome, which initially seems like simply a long digression from the plot, ends up being referred back to later in the novel in a rather delightful way; characters who initially seem like they are simply involved due to random whims by the Count later end up being the linchpins of his plots.

That said, there is much to be said for the translation by Robin Buss.  The Penguin Classics edition of The Count of Monte Cristo is the only English translation available that is completely unabridged and unadulterated, but this doesn't mean that the added material in this edition makes it a harder read; rather, it serves to give a wonderfully-detailed portrait of the locales that the characters are in, and to show the education levels of the characters.  Aspects of character growth that might not be present in an edition that comes from eras where works were modified during translation to remove 'objectionable' content are quite evident here, so that even some of the minor characters are well-developed.

It's not a difficult read, it's just long.  The length may seem daunting, but with relatively short chapters (the average length of a chapter being about 11 pages), there are plenty of places to stop and take a break, and most of the allusions made in the text are noted in the back, in order to make sure that even someone who isn't familiar with 19th century European politics or French drama that might not have ever been translated into any language besides French can have some appreciation for what Dumas is doing.  And the ending is wonderful, with the one major character who the Count least wanted to hurt yet brought closest to the point of no return in his despair having all made right, before the Count makes his disappearance from the stage, going into an unknown future where he might find happiness himself, ending the narrative on a moment of hope and grace.  We don't know where the Count will go or what he will turn his attentions toward, but one can only hope that his open reclaiming of his original name on the final page means that his long turn toward darkness is at an end.

The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame, 1908) (The Penguin Kenneth Grahame, 3/3)

 

And here we come to the third of Kenneth Grahame's major works, the one that he's perhaps best-known for now (and unfortunately the only one that Penguin currently publishes), The Wind in the Willows.  I was rather looking forward to reaching this, actually, I have a lot of vague memories of watching the 1980s television series, and of course Disney's take on the novel.  I know I attempted to read this once as a child, though I kind of bounced off of it.  Reading it now as an adult, I can see what went wrong at the time; I was looking for Mr. Toad's Wacky Adventures, and that's absolutely not what this is (mostly).

This is a decidedly different sort of work entirely from Grahame's two previous works, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its departure from the realism, albeit wonder-tinged, of The Golden Age and Dream Days.  Instead, we're in a world where certain animals dress and act in the same manner as people do, where the size of those animals in relation to humans seems to be based purely on what the narrative requires at that moment, and where an amphibian in a rather poor disguise can be easily mistaken for a human.

The first place to look for differences is simply in the nature of the work.  During the ten-year gap between Dream Days and this work, Grahame became a father, which significantly changed the shape of his audience.  Rather than writing for an ostensibly adult audience, as his newspaper columns were, The Wind in the Willows began as a series of tales that he was telling to his son.  This doesn't change his diction or his writing voice, but it does make this work rather less introspective.  Instead, it allows a shifting of perspectives between the characters to match the tone of each story.

There are three primary characters here, who are used as 'narrators' (though the whole work is told in the third person), though a fourth is generally considered a main character and has been included as a major character in all of the various adaptations over the years.  The character we spend the most time in the mind of is Mole, a simple but determined fellow who follows through on anything he's set to doing and tends to be easily drawn into other folks' activities.  Mole feels a sudden urge at the start of the book to leave his underground home, digs up to the surface, and is immediately overwhelmed by everything that is Springtime.  We're in a similarly pastoral setting to what was seen in The Golden Age and Dream Days, though without any time spent interacting with the nearby village.  Instead, the world of the animals is the wilds, with meadows, a river, a nearby forest, and beyond, the world of humans, which the animals prefer to steer clear of.  Mole quickly discovers the River, which is mindboggling to him, given that he's never seen anything of the sort.  At the same time, he meets Water Rat, a relaxed sort of fellow with a love of everything that has to do with the river and a taste for poetry.  Mole quickly decides to move in with Water Rat after the two share a picnic; the two will rarely be apart for the rest of the book.

Toad appears as a minor character, just spoken of, in the first chapter; he doesn't become a primary character until the second chapter, where a visit to Toad Hall results in him dragging Mole and Rat into his latest fixation, a horse-drawn caravan which he intends to go traveling the countryside in.  The characters are hesitant to get too involved, because Toad has a tendency to fixate on one thing until it loses some degree of charm for him, before moving on to something else; his exuberance for the idea of life on the road is able to push through his friends' reticence so that they end up going on his journey with him.  This goes well until the two rodents force Toad to actually do some of the work involved in this sort of travels, which quickly sours him on the prospect, aided by the caravan being run off the road and wrecked by a motor-car driving by at speed.  This sets up Toad's overall plotline (and the only actual ongoing plotline for the book), as he becomes obsessed by cars instead, and by the following morning has placed an order for one of his own.

We next meet Badger, a gruff sort of country gentleman of the sort who doesn't particularly care for society but is most welcoming to those in distress, who lives in the middle of the Wild Wood.  Mole and Rat come to his home during a snowstorm that leaves them stranded in the forest, and he gladly lets them in to stay the night and warm up.  He's a kind but stern fellow, whose biggest desire seems to be for there to be a certain degree of civility and stability to the countryside.  He's the sort that nobody particularly wants to cross, as well; Mole and Rat were somewhat threatened by the weasels and stoats who also live in the forest when they were caught after dark, and Badger makes it clear that they'll not see any further issues once it's known that they're his friends; after all, a badger is rather larger than most other mustelids.  At the same time, we learn that the Wild Wood is in a place where humans used to have a village; Badger's home is built in what is apparently a former basement.  This doesn't mean humans are gone, just they're not in that particular spot right now.

The small plotlines that continue in the book are similar small pastoral adventures, with Rat and Mole encountering a forest god (implied to be Pan) in one chapter (though they promptly forget, a gift from the god stated as being a way to ensure that their lives won't be seen as never reaching that peak again), and another having Rat be tempted toward running off to sea, until Mole returns him to his sanity.

The largest plotline, though, is Toad's misadventures as his arrogance and lack of common sense gets him in trouble, repeatedly; this is what the Disney film dealt with, and what the youthful me was expecting.  His fixation with motor-cars refuses to be sated even after he has wrecked six of them, and landed in the hospital three times; when Rat, Mole, and Badger attempt a forced intervention, he flees out the window, runs halfway to the human village nearby, steals a car, gets himself arrested, and winds up thrown into jail.  The subsequent escape (thanks to the warden's daughter who takes some pity on him because he's an animal) involves cross-dressing, sneaking aboard a train under false pretenses, stealing a horse, hijacking the same car again and driving it into a lake, and finally being swept up in the River's currents and delivered to Rat's door, across several chapters.  This leads to the revelation that the weasels, stoats, and ferrets from the Wild Wood have taken over Toad Hall, and finally a nighttime raid by the four friends to retake the manor from the invaders, and Toad finally learning a little bit of humility in the process.

It's obvious just why Toad is so beloved; children are obviously going to be amused by a goofy character who gets into all manner of slapstick scrapes.  But while his plotline may be the lion's share of the novel (six of the novel's twelve chapters deal with the Motor-Car fixation and its results, from beginning to end), the overall feel of the piece is far more in line with the lifestyles of Mole, Rat, and Badger.  These three are content with their lots in life; Mole may get homesick for his burrow, but he knows where it is and can easily stop by, and in fact does, and a more dependable fellow simply can't be found.  Rat may be swayed easily by a bit of storytelling, but the small pleasures of riverside life are more than enough for him if he just spends a bit of time writing.  And Badger stands by his friends, even if he's a bit of a scary old codger at times.  They serve to ground things against the rampaging id that is Toad, and where Toad is apt to give up at a small setback and rarely seems to think beyond a few moments ahead, the three of them together are more than able to offset Toad's shortcomings.

The one thing that is perhaps the most perplexing about this piece as a whole is the question of just what an 'animal' is within this context.  There are a number of characters who are apparently of similar size to one another despite being far differently-sized in nature (particularly Badger alongside everyone else), and Toad in particular interacts with a number of clearly human artifacts, including his motor-cars and the washerwoman's outfit that he 'borrows' in order to escape from jail, and that's leaving aside the question of the manor-house that is Toad Hall, and, well, the success of the washerwoman disguise.  On the other hand, Rat's temptation toward the seas comes from encountering a Sea Rat on the road, who has apparently made a habit of sneaking aboard ships by climbing into rowboats or up ropes, and likes to bunk in the captain's cabin, which implies that he's, well... rat-sized.  Songbirds are kept in cages by both people and animals alike, but Rat is able to have conversations with migratory avians on the subject of why they go south for the Winter rather than sticking around closeby.  Toad's caravan is pulled by a horse, who clearly isn't the same kind of animal as the other folk; the horse he steals during his escape from the law is likewise little more than a pack beast.  And the warden's daughter apparently likes animals as pets, but knows better than to mention that to the captive Toad.

It's a strange dichotomy that is far from clearly-delineated, and serves to give a sort of dream-like quality to the work, that makes it a wonderful chaser for Grahame's other two major works.  It's the only one of the three that really felt like it had a fully-satisfying ending, though; where The Golden Age and Dream Days both ended with a sort of eulogy for childhood, The Wind in the Willows wraps up with the promise that while Toad may be a little less conceited and devoted to his impulses, the four of them are going to continue in their lives with the status quo re-established.  All has been brought back to the way it should be, and the pastoral life remains, a little slice of Arcady within the English countryside, complete with the god who mythologically lived in the Greek region.  It's a version of the world seen in Grahame's earlier works that can go on in adulthood, where there may be some strife between residents but existence is largely harmonious, and where the line between nature and 'civilized' life is blurred to the point of nonexistence.