Fairly well said, old mole
Alan Coren
ADRIAN MOLE: THE WILDERNESS YEARS by Sue Townsend Methuen, £8.99, pp. 182 The trouble with a kitten is that eventu- ally it becomes a cat, but what the hell, it is not as if there were that many good humorists around these days, in proof of which I offer you the leaden conceit that if the pussy concerned is down the well, that in itself should not stop the bucket being taken to it yet again. Sue Townsend deservedly has countless millions of slaver- ing fans and is therefore honour-bound, willy nilly, to continue to slake their prof- itable thirst until the well runs dry, even if it means stalking Adrian Mole into the very confines of the grave. Nor need she, I sup- pose, stop there: if an author gets a charac- ter right, there will always be addicts shrilly clamouring at the foot of the Reichenbach Falls for a retroactive lifebelt.
Adrian Mole is still right, but he is 23, now, an age at which innocence becomes, if you don't watch out, naivety, an idiosyncra- sy invariably more irritating. You have to be George and Weedon Grossmith to han- dle a grown dingbat without losing the reader's patience at his twerpery, and even then, Charles Pooter himself occasionally puts one's teeth dangerously close to the edge. Indeed, Mole's maturity, albeit notional, has stuck Townsend with the very problem of comparison not only with Diary of a Nobody, a yardstick against which no humorist should ever risk measurement, but with all its parodies, notably those by Basil Boothroyd, Keith Waterhouse and Christopher Matthew, which also offer the tough competition she didn't have ten years ago, when Adrian wur nobbut a lad, and cheeringly sui generis.
That said, Townsend has lost none of her eye for the trash and folly of the times, nor any of her ear for its fumbling cock- shies at communication. As literally a chronicle, the book is at its satirical best, and at its funniest, too, not least in the pur- suit of a jolly metafictional joke involving a best-seller called Dork's Diary, written by Mole's hated ex-schoolmate Barry Kent, the butt of which is a ghastly prat called Aiden Vole. It is an economical device: more than just Sue Townsend's engaging self-deflation and a tilt at the appalling state of contemporary publishing which has clearly generated the guilty need in her to self-deflate, it is a piece of structural cun- ning by which Kent's unstoppable ascent mirrors Mole's unstoppable decline — a trick, true, which has long been a mainstay to the English tradition of inverse homily, but Townsend deploys it deftly, cleverly, and very — I'm afraid I'm going to have to say this — professionally.
For that is what Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years finally is: a highly profes- sional job, hand-turned by a confident craftsperson, astutely targeted to its mar- ket, packed with the quality ingredients which that market has come to relish, per- fectly finished, sleekly polished, bite-size formatted for effortless newspaper seriali- sation, and such an unquestionable hard- back snip at £8.99 that the Methuen salesmen will hurtle to their laden vans with a new spring in their step. But do not ask them whether they think its hero may perhaps have lost something of what he once had; they will only shrug, grin, and tell you that it comes with the territory.
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