There is at least one small proof that literary criticism will never be a science, and it’s that there is no theory of art capable of explaining exactly why Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows is great fiction — like George Borrow’s The Bible in Spain or Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford, one of the small, eccentric glories of English literature.
It has something to do with the prose, of course — as demonstrated by the utter failure of attempts to Disneyfy The Wind in the Willows in cartoons for the video generation of children. Grahame had a diction so perfect only P. G. Wodehouse can stand with him.
But more even than any of Wodehouse’s creaky melodramas, The Wind in the Willows ought not to work as a book. Its world is wildly inconsistent. Half the time Mr. Toad and Badger and Otter and Ratty and Mole are little animals in human clothing, and the other half, they’re little humans in animal clothing. Sometimes the book is an allegory about the lost days of old, squirearchical, coach-and-inn England, and sometimes it’s just a fantasy of talking beasts. There are parts of The Wind in the Willows that no one under thirty could possibly grasp, and other parts that no one over ten will ever grasp again. Mostly it’s a tale of Eden — of a world without a Fall — and through it runs something inexplicably, impossibly, and magically right.
And in the same way — or rather, in reverse — the failure of Bernard Werber’s Empire of the Ants, a best-seller in France in 1991 and recently translated into English by Margaret Rocques, offers yet another small proof of the truth in books that readers know but that lies beyond the capacity of any theory to express.
A tale of the meeting of talking ants and human beings, Empire of the Ants has every reason to work as a novel. It is carefully written in the kind of classically balanced prose the French manage so effortlessly. It is the fruit of great learning by an entomologist who has spent fifteen years studying ants. It is careful in its allegory and consistent in its fantasy. And yet, somehow, every reader who can sense that The Wind in the Willows is right will inevitably sense that Empire of the Ants is wrong.
Set during the early twenty-first century, in a Paris grown hot from global warming, Werber’s story opens with a man named Jonathan Wells moving his family into the house on the rue des Sybarites that they inherited after his eccentric Uncle Edmond was stung to death by wasps.
Unfortunately, Uncle Edmond also left them in his will a single, impossibly tempting piece of advice: “Above all, never go down into the cellar.” And one by one, the family succumb to the temptation and disappear down into the basement, never to return.
Meanwhile, in alternate chapters, an empire of African ant cities has established itself in the sweltering countryside outside of Paris. And in one of those cities, called Belokan, three ants have stumbled upon what looks to be a giant conspiracy to undermine the colony. There’s a drone male known as number 327, a winged princess known as number 56, and a female worker known as 103,683. Amid much fascinating explanation from the author about the social organization of various insects and how ants communicate with chemical scents, 327, 56, and 103,683 undertake a dangerous mission to find the origin of the mysterious “rock-scented” ants who have infiltrated Belokan.
The human story and the ant story link up in the end, though the author seems gradually to lose interest in his humans as his ant chapters grow longer and longer. Some of Werber’s descriptions are very fine, especially about ant warfare, and he is capable of genuine if slightly jarring humor — as when he describes a spider who suddenly encounters a mate on his web: “Her way of vibrating was the most erotic thing the male had ever felt. Tap tap taptaptap tap tap taptap. Ah, he could no longer resist her charms and ran to his beloved (a mere slip of a thing only four moults old, whereas he was already twelve). She was three times as big as he, but then he liked his females big.”
But Empire of the Ants at last fails for reasons that are hard to say. It has something to do with the grossness of a few scenes — particularly the repeated descriptions of the ways that ants can kill birds and animals by entering their orifices. And it has something to do with the author’s inability to decide whether he wants to teach us about ants or humans. But it has perhaps most to do with the book’s failure to create a world that readers would want, through reading, to curl up in for a while.
Animal tales are hard, perhaps the hardest genre in fiction to do well. In Watership Down, Richard Adams managed to capture in a small way something of the actual feel of Homer, retold with rabbits. But he was never as successful again, and such subsequent animal tales as The Plague Dogs and last year’s sequel, Tales from Watership Down, are only echoes of his first book.
The animal books that do manage the difficult feat have little in common. There’s pure allegory, like the Fables of Aesop and of La Fontaine, or George Orwell’s Animal Farm. There’s semi-allegory, like the Brer Rabbit tales in Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus. And there’s deliberate anti- allegory, like E. B. White’s Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web. There are books that want really to teach us only about animals, like Sheila Burnford’s The Incredible Journey, and books that want really to teach us only about humans, like Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books. And they all seem to work.
No sure explanation can be given for exactly why Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows tops this class and Bernard Werber’s Empire of the Ants falls out. To say that one is magic and one is not seems no help at all. But that is the truth beyond all theory that only readers know.
J.
