Book Description

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 1990's - 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. 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 Wind In The Pylons is a cult classic in the making, a wonderful pastiche of an old masterpiece, and arguably the first definitive environmental and counter-corporate satire.