Return to the Willows : Sequel to Grahame’s children’s classic fails to carry on his vision : THE WILLOWS IN WINTER, <i> By William Horwood</i> . <i> Illustrated by Patrick Benson (St. Martin’s Press / A Thomas Dunne Book: $18.95; 295 pp.)</i>

Considering the recent commercial success of posthumous sequels to celebrated novels (“Scarlett,” Alexandra Ripley’s 1991 postscript to “Gone With the Wind,” sold an astonishing 2.3 million copies), it was only a matter of time before publishers began searching the world of children’s literature for likely candidates. Since nothing is sacred in the corporate land of bottom-line, could there be a better place to start than Kenneth Grahame’s “Wind in the Willows,” arguably the greatest children’s book of them all and a perennial bestseller to boot?

So, step aside, Scarlett, and make way for Mr. Toad, Water Rat, Mole and Badger who have returned in the pages of William Horwood’s “The Willows in Winter.” When it was first published in Great Britain last year, the book enjoyed brisk sales, spending 12 weeks on the London Times bestseller list. With an impressive first printing of 100,000 copies by its American publisher, the book is obviously expected to do equally well here in the States.

If a sequel to this enduring classic had to be written (though Grahame himself refused to do so, explaining that “sequels are often traps which the wise author does well to avoid”), William Horwood is not a bad choice to do it. After all, this former journalist is the author of the popular Duncton Wood series, six massive fantasies chronicling the imagined lives and civilization of a race of sentient moles living in a wood near Oxford. His established sympathy with the small animals of the natural world and his obvious love for the Willows characters stand him in good stead here. As a sequel to Grahame’s enduring childhood classic, however, his book is ultimately a failure--but an interesting failure, because its shortcomings point up Grahame’s successes.

“The Wind in the Willows,” you will remember, is essentially two stories: The first finds an exasperated Mole fleeing from the rigors of spring housecleaning and discovering the world of the river bank and a new friendship with one of its residents, the Water Rat. The second follows the outrageous misadventures of the wealthy Toad, master of Toad Hall but hapless slave to his exuberant enthusiasms, particularly for shiny motor cars that go “poop-poop.”

When Mole, Rat, and the stern Badger restrain Toad for his own good, he escapes, steals a motor car, is apprehended and locked up in “the remotest dungeon of the stoutest castle in Merry England.” He escapes and at length returns to Toad Hall, a chastened, repentant and “indeed, an altered Toad.”

Sure he was! Not even Grahame believed that one. “Of course Toad was never really reformed,” he admitted later, “he was by nature incapable of it. But the subject is a painful one to pursue.”

Not for Horwood, however, who relishes the premise that, some years later, the recidivist Toad has finally backslid, his mania for motor cars now replaced by an all-consuming passion for flying machines.

Once Toad is aloft, the story takes off, just as his earlier misadventures had propelled Grahame’s plot.

If Toad has captured Horwood’s imagination, it is Mole who has won his heart. Indeed, Horwood claims that it was his acquisition of one of E. H. Shepard’s brilliant illustrations of Mole in the Wild Wood that was the inspiration for this sequel.

Like Grahame before him, Horwood begins his book with Mole, though not in the midst of spring housecleaning, this time, but at his ease in front of a fire in the dead of winter, instead. While Horwood’s principal characters are Grahame’s own, he has taken the liberty of introducing a new character, Mole’s young nephew, whose only purpose--aside from suggesting the possibility of a sequel to the sequel--seems to be to venerate Mole and by his attitude to invest that small animal with almost mythical largeness. This, it seems to me, is one of Horwood’s first mistakes. For if you consider the quartet of Grahame’s chief characters to be a family, Badger would be the stern but benevolent father; Rat, the oldest, resourceful brother; Toad, the egocentrically solipsistic infant, and Mole, the middle brother--always loyal but sometimes naive and sometimes timid, too. By pushing him ahead in the pecking order, Horwood has violated the integrity of Grahame’s neatly ordered family world. And so when Mole --through misunderstanding--believes Rat to be in danger, he boldly sets off, at night, in the middle of a blizzard to rescue him. Instead, he disappears, and the first part of the book tells of the other animals’ fruitless search for him. Toad and his flying machine are impressed into service but Toad--through an awkwardly plotted stratagem--escapes to his own (mis)adventures and the plot then moves back and forth between him and the other animals, following essentially the same structure that Grahame used, though Grahame’s narrative is punctuated--some critics would say interrupted--by a number of gorgeously written chapters that offer quiet reflection on the comforts and emotional importance of home (“Dulce Domum”), a salute to the siren song of the South (“Wayfarers All”) and a panegyric to Pan, the Helper and Healer of small animals in distress (“The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”). There is little of this in Horwood’s book, his narrative being more continuous and swiftly paced and more agreeable, thus, to impatient modern readers. And yet this absence of the reflective is the chief reason for the relative failure of Horwood’s book.

Understand that Grahame was a deeply conflicted man. Superficially he was a professional success--an Establishment figure, the youngest secretary in the history of the Bank of England, starchy, well-to-do and respected. Yet deep within him lived another Grahame--the child who, at 7, suffered the death of his mother and abandonment by his alcoholic father. Along with his brothers and sister, he was remanded to the emotionally distant care of his grandmother who lived in Berkshire. It was that beautiful countryside which, when he retired there 40 years later, provided both the setting and emotional catalyst for the creation of his great classic childhood. Never entirely comfortable with the “real” (i.e., adult) world, burdened by an unhappy marriage that he escaped at every occasion to flee, alone, to the “South” (usually Italy), befriending Bohemian companions (not unlike Toad!) but denied the freedoms of their lives; dismayed by the inroads of the Industrial Age, which were so destructive to the comfortable, established, clubby order of his world, Grahame retreated to his fiction where all of this subterranean material emerged, in symbol and allegory.

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Two examples from “Wind”: first, the terrifying stoats and weasels of the Wild Wood--the personifications of the impersonal terrors of the Machine Age--invade and take over Toad Hall, the ancient and ancestral home, when the Establishment animals are distracted by Bohemian Toad’s peccadilloes. Horwood has made the mistake of domesticating these Wild animals, even of having them assist in the search for Mole, just for the sake of an invitation to Badger’s tea party! Secondly, Grahame had a deeply pantheistic veneration for the natural world and an attendant interest in the neo-pagan movement (his first book was even titled The Pagan Papers). This devotion inspired the mystical chapter “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.” Horwood tries to emulate this by giving both Mole and Rat near-death experiences and a vision of “Beyond” (paradise) yet his “vision” is tepidly New Age and totally lacking in the primal power of Grahame’s intensely personal vision.

Because “The Wind in the Willows” is such a personal book, no other author--even a talented one like Horwood--can hope to capture more than its superficial style; its essence is forever elusive.

If Horwood has set himself an impossible task, so has illustrator Patrick Benson. There have been more than 100 different editions of “The Wind in the Willows” but only one--that of 1931 with illustrations by E. H. Shepard--is considered definitive by devotees. A great genius, Shepard (who also illustrated A.A. Milne’s “Winnie the Pooh”) somehow contrived to capture in pictures the wonderfully realized reality of Grahame’s prose. Shepard’s black-and-white illustrations--some full-page, some sketches, some vignettes--are artfully placed among the text to offer not only an aesthetically delightful book but a richly imagined expansion of Grahame’s own vision. Benson’s pictures, on the other hand, are muddy and oddly vague, perhaps because he lacks both Shepard’s art and understanding that the heavily anthropomorphized characters must be simultaneously animal and human. Thus, Benson’s characters either lack personality or approach the grotesque (his Toad looks less like a toad than a mutant ninja turtle!), while his images seem carelessly dropped on the page rather than gracefully placed like Shepard’s. Ultimately “The Willows in Winter”--despite its obvious and abundant good intentions--is a manufactured book rather than an inspired one. And that, finally, is the telling difference between it and Grahame’s unique and enduring original.