The Wind in the Pylons: Adventures of the Mole in Weaselworld: 1 [Paperback]

With this intelligent, biting parody of The Wind In The Willows, the author explores the state of our lives and the English environment through the eyes of Mole, who has inadvertently stumbled into the future, into a world like ours. The Weasels have won, not by battle, but by seducing the animals into unbridled pursuit of wealth. The result is not only degradation of the countryside by intensive farming, industrial development and urban sprawl, but loss of the rural dignity and serenity so beautifully portrayed in the original. There are wonderful moments of bleak humour in this book, interwoven with savage insights into the narrow and morally bereft lives of those who control society through conspiracy between big business and political ambition. Toad's descendant sits right at the centre of power, but happily still retains the family's frightening yet entertaining habits. Gareth Lovett Jones has captured the essence of Grahame's writing style and acute observation, turning the original story upside down in a way that is uncomfortably close to home. As I pass through the streets of our cities, the business parks and commuter villages that now invade so much of our countryside, I am constantly reminded of scenes and characters in this book. Read it and look around. --Brian Johnston, English Nature

Lovett Jones's timely rewrite of a classic novel provides a shocking reminder of how much and how fast our environment is being despoiled and degraded - often with the assistance of those who should be acting for the public interest. Read it - then join an environmental pressure group. --Tony Juniper, Executive Director, Friends Of The Earth

The idea behind this book is brilliantly conceived. What would our innocent friends of the Wind in The Willows have made of the modern day desecration of the countryside and ruthless pursuit of commerce over beauty? The book is funny, sarcastic and biting. --Ann Widdecombe, MP

"I screamed with laughter."

When Mole (from Kenneth Grahame's The Wind In The Willows) finds a tunnel behind the big old cupboard in his kitchen and goes exploring, little does he know the adventures in store. For the passage-way turns out to be a time tunnel that eventually brings him out in the mid 1990s - a strange world in which his beloved valley has been devastated by hulking shed-like shopping zones and most of the animals seem to be trapped inside flotillas of bizarrely-shaped contraptions moving at nightmare speeds along a network of titanic roads. He meets descendants or look-alikes of his old chums, all involved in business, politics and such like. But the time tunnel has unaccountably invested in him a magical skill: whomever he is near is unable to resist telling him the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. After a chance meeting with Mr Gordon R Rette - a water-rat, of course - Head of Degirthing (ie Redundancies) at petrochemicals giant, Toad Transoceanic, the Mole comes to the notice of company boss, Mr Humfrey Wyvern-Toad. Discerning the Mole's unusual truth-saying effect on those near him, the Toad sees at once that this is a skill he can turn to his advantage. In a series of encounters, Mole learns about virtually every facet of modern life: farming, the environment, politics, big business, information technology, modern art - all are unmercifully unmasked before the Mole's innocent and incredulous eyes. A biting satire on modern Britain, by turns scathing and heart-rending, The Wind In The Pylons captures its essence, seen through the eyes of an innocent abroad. The author, with sharp eye and cutting wit, holds a mirror up to the way we live today : compared with Kenneth Grahame's bucolic view of life at the turn of the last century, it is not a pretty sight. Part Orwellian satire showcasing the inhuman values of today's New Right, part rumbustious comic novel, part moving elegy for a lost world of childhood innocence and a vanished rural England, The

Perhaps the first environmental and counter-corporate satire, The Wind In The Pylons lays bare many aspects of modern life, including our destruction of the natural world and our dependence on the motor car. The author embodies the book’s message that "small is beautiful" by cycling across East Anglia to promote the book to local, independent bookstores. He and his publishers believe that it is in the nation’s surviving network of small and independent bookshops, rather than in the big chains (which in any case are mutually enamoured of large publishers) that his prospective readers are most likely to be found. "I can honestly say," says Gareth, "that everyone I met was intrigued by the project, and several people told me they were pleased to find an author involving himself at the selling end."

It was in this same spirit that Gareth sought a small, independent publisher at the outset. Hilltop is striving to keep the idea of independent publishing of serious fiction alive in the UK in a period of "rationalisation" in which even the longest-lived and most venerable British publishing houses – John Murray and Harvill Press are recent examples – find themselves being hoovered up and embalmed as mere imprints of conglomerates.

Who are the weasels? Author Gareth Lovett Jones comments:

"For Kenneth Grahame the weasels were simply what he did not like, and may perhaps have feared – the ‘grasping proletariat’ of his day, as one of his biographers describes them. I have taken just the same tack, except that in my case the betes noires are such things as New Right politicians and economists, and the leaders and apologists of today’s terrifying corporate greed-culture which puts profit and shareholder interests above all other considerations, the small matter of our continuing survival on the planet amongst them."

Weaselworld is an apocalyptic place, totally unsuited to a sensitive creature such as the Mole, were it not for one strange fact: in this world of the future, no one who comes into the Mole’s company can do anything but speak the truth to him. And in a society where the lie is a standard tool of the professions and can be exposed to the advantage of those in the know, the Mole rapidly finds himself a rising star in the eyes of one of its wiliest arch-manipulators, the Chief Executive Animal of petro-chemicals giant Toad Transoceanic, Mr Humfrey Wyvern-Toad.

Corruption And The Apocalypse

Often a wildly funny book, The Wind In The Pylons may well be the best satire the green movement has yet had written for it. Alongside the prototype New Right politicians of Thatcherism and Majorism, memorably epitomised in the appalling character of Minister For (Development-) Development, the Rt Hon Gibbert Phangachs MP, amongst others, there is the second generation - ‘young’ Mr Probity Stote of the New Animalists and his Shadow Minister, Mr Nosepoak Catpole. (The author has extended Grahame’s range of furry animals in a number of directions, with names to match.)

Root and branch, this is a corrupt and biddable politics whose representatives bend over backwards to service only the most large-scale business interests, where government committees are funded and largely staffed by the manufacturers of the products they regulate, and ‘science’ is used not to expose the truth behind potentially dangerous products but to rubber-stamp them. Above all, it is a politics without dissent: in Weaselworld all animals of any influence are agreed on the highest power – the ne plus ultra invoked to justify any action, however destructive – they call it the ‘Mystery Of The Market.’

Though constructed like a children’s book, The Wind In The Pylons could hardly be more urgent, and for much of its length it is a work of lacerating, Swiftian indignation.

"I have never joined in with street protests and the like," says the author. "Who knows, perhaps I should have done. But I have kept tabs on the issues over the last two decades, and this novel is my way of contributing something concrete (and very largely factual) to the debate. Read George Monbiot’s "Captive State", or Tom Athanasiou’s "Slow Reckoning" or "False Dawn", Professor John Gray’s withering book on the multinationals, or Bruce Rich’s or Arundhati Roy’s very distinct accounts of the crimes against humanity of the World Bank during the eighties and early nineties, or Marion Shoard’s and Graham Harvey’s books on the inexorable, state-engineered spread of chemical agribusiness. How can anyone confront facts like these and not feel indignation? Unless of course you are part of the game, as so many people are, and take the position that endemic corruption is in some way ‘natural’?"
How, then, did The Wind In The Pylons come into being?

"There came a point in the mid nineties when I had got sick to the point of nausea with turning on the ‘Today’ programme and hearing the voice of the next – what can one call them? – ‘professional ameliorator’? – giving only the very best of reasons for whichever stark new outrage it happened to be: Shell in Nigeria, the Newbury by-pass, Monsanto on the safety of ‘BST’ in milk, some NFU man talking up the wonders of modern farming. The Wind In The Pylons is in one sense a kind of love-letter to such people, and to the nineties as a whole: they certainly supplied me, one after another, with a multi-coloured parade of weasels, though the book also had to obey generic laws, and that includes an element of cartoon-like exaggeration. But how is it possible to exaggerate something like a university Chair in ‘Corporate Ethics’, funded by that paragon in the field, BAT? In a world where the behaviour of organisations is already grotesque, the irony must be at its sharpest where one does little more than photocopy it."

In The Line Of Fire

The targets of Gareth Lovett Jones’s excoriating love-letter do not stop at ardently biddable ‘Darwinian’ politicians, manically hubristic trans-nationals bosses or the bent and temporising scientists who serve them. The Mole’s uneasy journey brings him up against many other shining examples of weaseline behaviour, and, as the author says:

"They are all linked, though I was quite some way into the writing before I knew that for sure. The best I could find to say for the weasels occurs in a little scene (actually in Volume Two) where a group of them are being taken on a guided walk in the Chilterns, and one of the party seems to be experiencing some kind of race memory of a time when they too were a part of nature.

"As to the main players, every last one of them has lost his respect for nature – his understanding of nature’s laws of balance and gradualism. Each animal is seeking to expand his own exclusive territory outwards, and then again outwards, into whatever may be left to colonise.

"Why are all the characters male? It’s not so far from reality, is it? The brute colonising instinct always falls to the male of the species. But there is another reason, because I made a point of respecting the unities of Grahame’s book wherever I could and his characters are, of course, to the last speaking part male. This is pastiche, and if pastiche doesn’t love what it copies, then it has lost its reader before it starts."

So the Mole passes by way of the Master of a fox hunt (a toad, in case anyone was wondering), to the site of a grim chicken battery (owners absent in all but deed).

Meantime, by way of his meeting with Toad Transoceanic’s Head of Degirthing, the tragi-comic Mr Rette – a water rat of course – the Mole comes to understand more than he might have wished about the nightmare treadmill of the ‘deregulated’ work-slave living in constant terror of redundancy; and through Mr Rette’s teenage son, Justin, he comes face to face with information technology, and the psychic and intellectual traps it sets for the unwary.

Throughout the book the Mole remains a symbol of hope, by remaining true to himself and acting as the small sweet voice of a very practical reason.

"Everything else is different here – that includes the Rat, the Toad and the Badger in my reinventions of them. So it was crucial I should keep the Mole recognisably as Grahame made him – candid, loyal, stout-hearted, sometimes prone to childlike displays of emotion, not the most articulate of fellows but prepared to struggle against barely comprehensible jargons and his own verbal limitations to get at the truth. He is a visitor from another age, but he is also something deeper: he represents innocence – the innocence that Grahame himself imagined, and no doubt hoped to find in himself. The innocence of the pre-lapsarian world he has come from, the world of children’s storybooks. So long as there are Moles about, there may be hope for us – even Mr Rette seems to be changing towards the end, as a result of having met him, though the Toad of course is quite beyond reform."

"Beyond The Wild Wood comes the Wide World," said the Rat. "And that's something that doesn't matter, either to you or me. I've never been there, and I'm never going, nor you either, if you've got any sense at all. Don't ever refer to it again, please!"
Kenneth Grahame
The Wind in The Willows

The Adventures of the Mole in Weaselworld.

By mysterious means, the much-loved Mole (from The Wind in The Willows) finds himself in a modern adventure, which leads him to a series of extraordinary encounters, far removed from the bucolic original.
Kenneth Grahame’s familiar characters reappear here in drastically altered guises, in a book that is by turns an Orwellian satire on contemporary affairs and a heart-rending elegy for an all-but-vanished rural England.
Few targets escape the author’s scathing eye, be they New Right politicians, intensive farmers, machinating corporate bosses, foxhunters, computer gurus, or the architects of World Trade. Not to mention the poseurs of modern art.
Perhaps the first definitive environmental satire, this novel promises to transform the most uncommitted of readers into a green reformer. Gareth Lovett Jones’s prose will have you chortling with laughter even as you are crying at the shame of it all.

Gareth Lovett Jones is a photographer and author whose past work includes The Wildwood, an exploration of British ancient woodlands; English Country Lanes, a cyclist's eye-view of the countryside; and the novel, Valley With A Bright Cloud. His photographs also appear in Richard Mabey's Flora Britannica. He is currently working on a photographic exhibition on the subject of veteran yew trees. He lives on the Oxfordshire/Berkshire border by the reach of the Thames where Kenneth Grahame made his final home.

As always it took the Mole a good half minute to adjust to the sudden brilliance – although the day was cloudy, so that he did not need to screw up his eyes quite so tightly as if the sun had been out. But even before he could look about him easily, he knew for certain that something was wrong. He sniffed the air, wrinkling up his nose in instant distaste. There was a smell about – several smells, in fact, but one in particular that stood out: acrid, sharp, almost like that of a salt wind blowing off a seaweedy sea, yet seeming to the Mole’s sensitive nose not of Nature at all. Straight away his eyes began to itch. And there was too a strange, awesome sound, such as he had never heard before nor could possibly have imagined. It was like a great continuous exhalation, or rumbling, or combination of the two, in which pulses of whining also grew and then dimmed, grew and then dimmed. Somehow it seemed far away and close by, all at the same time.

"O, but where am I?" he thought to himself, half out loud. "What can have happened?"

As his vision adjusted so he began to look about him more keenly. And the first thing that struck him, like a hammer blow, was how little there was to see, and how utterly, utterly strange what he could see was. Through his own front door he would come straight up into a grassy meadow, close by a hedge whose neat rounded shape was always, by late March, dazzlingly patterned over with the tiny white blooms of the blackthorn. There was a great old oak – not in the hedge, but standing by it – whose arm-like twisted roots had been gnawed and then polished by the oily wool of resting sheep. Yet no such landmarks existed here. Instead, next to him, he found an odd, ugly little short grey post. It had a broad head bearing a door of some kind, embossed with the letters LI-OO192-PX. It made a low, slow and continuous ticking, like a grandfather clock in the very last moments before it runs down. A few yards behind this object stood a series of broken fragments of hawthorn and elder, growing in a line along a very low bank with wide gaps between them. Far away to the south, in the direction of what ought to have been his everyday entrance, there stood a big dead tree.

The ground itself was mossed, with blackened stumps of some crop of long ago sticking up from it as if it might once have been plough-land, then abandoned. A line of tall posts made of a crude looking grey-white material ran across it as far as an unmade road. Beyond this, to the Mole’s left, stretched a ploughed field so huge that anything that lay beyond it might as well have been in the next county. On this vast space, made toy-like by distance, a strange yellow machine was slowly moving. Behind it, what looked like a white mist swirled out, impossibly, in a row of Catherine-wheeling shapes. The wind was blowing from just this direction.

The Mole hugged himself in anxiety, so startled by the sense of invisible danger all about him that he could not even move back towards the tunnel exit. "Something terrible – O, terrible – has happened here!" he whispered. Yet where was "here"? And how had he arrived in it?

"I must go back," he said, summoning the courage to make a move.

But just as he was about to take a step he saw a great grey vehicle with immensely fat, ridged tyres bouncing towards him over the rough ground. It was loaded with rolls of what looked like wire, and its engine made a monstrous grating-whining-growl of such a violence as he had never before heard nor imagined. Seeing this great beast come on directly at him, or so it seemed, what could any mole have done but turn and run from it? He ran in the direction of the unmade road, and within seconds the thing stood between him and the tunnel exit.

When he reached the track, still in a panic, the Mole hurried on along it. The animals that jumped down from the vehicle – a very rough-looking rabbit and, bizarrely, a couple of stoats – showed not the slightest interest in him, but the Mole was not about to go back and have a chat with them. Instead, puffing nervously, he trotted on towards a distant point where there was at least some hopeful sign of overhanging vegetation.

"This is not the adventure I wanted!" he whispered. A hundred yards further on, negotiating a large pothole filled with a crumbling black material and pieces of old brick, he said the same thing again, a little louder and rather more petulantly. Here isolated hawthorns stood a hundred yards apart from one another, trimmed flat across their tops as if at the hand of some lunatic of tidiness. These gradually increased in number until a quarter of a mile later the track was lined continuously along one side with blackthorn bushes – as the Mole might have expected – but grown out, and in curiously full bloom. Beyond and above the foam of tiny flowerets the Mole could also see the rearing grey-green tops of a series of shed-like things, once again inconceivably immense. They were built of deeply ridged materials, wholly unfamiliar to him, and had about them the look and feel of structures thrown up in preparation for a war.