I am often searching for what literary or tv character has the same basic energy as my cat (my bad cat) and I think I can say that it’s Toad. Toad is amazing.
If you haven’t read this book before, and I thought I had, but hadn’t, it’s truly wonderful. It’s the story of Toad, Rat, Mole, and Badger — four friends (who are probably gay, ahem, I mean, confirmed bachelors) who may be actual animals, may be humans, may be of relative size to one another, or might all be the same size. Who knows?
But they are all friends and neighbors in a small town away from the big city where nothing bad happens, unless you get yourself in to mischief. Toad has a problem. He’s deeply selfish, he’s narcissistic, he’s compulsive, and he’s impulsive. Among other things, he can’t stop driving cars, and driving them terribly. He also steals a car which sets off a whole chain of events that eventually involves all of his friends having to band together to fight a war against weasels and stoats. And! He’s kind of rich and could have bought a car on his own. It’s all a kind of hilarious send-up of that weird period in British (and American history) where not a lot was happening and the most of the problems in society are based on the bored aristocracy creating issues. Cars are new to the world, so it’s interesting that Graham already had them pegged as the huge problems they’d become.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Rogue-Male-Review-Books-Classics/dp/1590172434/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1589642589&sr=8-1)