The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole (Sue Townsend)

 --The blurb--
"Adrian Mole's first love, Pandora, has left him; a neighbour, Mr. Lucas, appears to be seducing his mother (and what does that mean for his father?); the BBC refuses to publish his poetry; and his dog swallowed the tree off the Christmas cake. "Why" indeed."

--The review-- 
Epistolary novels - such as, most popularly, Flowers for Algernon, the Bridget Jones series, and The Color Purple - have been enjoyed by the public for centuries, with Bram Stoker's Dracula arguably being one of the first. However, perhaps nobody could have estimated the explosive impact that Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole series would have when it first appeared on the market in the early 1980s. It was perhaps the first series to truly encapsulate teenage awkwardness and pretension, and it all kicked off with The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, set during Margaret Thatcher's time as prime minister, when protagonist Adrian is approaching his fourteenth birthday.

Townsend convincingly portrays the naïveté and arrogance commonly associated with one's teenage years, using Adrian and his friends as conduits, while simultaneously showing adults as imperfect, with humour and panache. Despite this, though, there is also affection: we don't look down upon Adrian (too much - the rule of superiority still applies in Townsend's comedy), but rather sympathise with him in recognising elements of ourselves in his emergence from childhood's chrysalis.

The fictional diary format and inclusion of dialogue helps to keep up The Secret Diary's pace, and we are keen to know what will become of the book's burgeoning romances and characters' ambitions (both trivial and serious) against the background of the 1980s' familiar political landscape. Regardless of the reader's own feelings towards the Thatcher administration, it is possible to gain an insight into family life at that time, which is particularly valuable for those with no first-hand experience of Thatcher's Britain. Equally, though, this does not dominate to the point of exclusion: the stories of Adrian and his family and friends always come first. 

By the end of The Secret Diary, readers want to continue following Adrian's life with earnest - and with over 20 million copies sold of this volume alone, it's clear that Townsend's germination of a successful epistolary series has worked better year on year than perhaps anyone could have imagined.

other novels by Sue Townsend The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole (1984)
Rebuilding Coventry (1988) The True Confessions of Adrian Albert Mole (1989) The Queen and I (1992) Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years (1993) Ghost Children (1997) Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years (1999) Number Ten (2002) Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction (2004) Queen Camilla (2006) The Lost Diaries of Adrian Mole, 1999-2001 (2008) Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years (2009) The Woman Who Went To Bed For A Year (2012) Public Confessions of a Middle-Aged Woman (2012)

The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole (Sue Townsend)

--The blurb--
"'If I turn out to be mentally deranged in adult life, it will be all my mother's fault.'
Adrian Mole continues to struggle valiantly against the slings and arrows of growing up and his own family's attempts to scar him for life in this second volume of his secret diary."
 
--The review--
A question that dogs university students of literature everywhere is this: should we read literature intrinsically, or extrinsically? Is the time period in which a text was written important? Or do plot, characters and so on matter more? Is all literature reflective of the time period in which it was created, regardless of whether or not it deliberately set out to do this? Children of the 1980s may not have grown up with Sue Townsend's classic Adrian Mole series, but now that they are older, it is a shining example not only of comedic British literature, but also a good representation of life for many people throughout their early childhoods. And as protagonist Adrian ages, Townsend - who is renowned for her skilled social commentary - continues to do a sterling job of documenting the United Kingdom in which we have lived, and continue to live today.

Now, nearly thirty years on from the 1984 publication of the series' second volume, entitled The Growing Pains Of Adrian Mole, even those who are not fans of extrinsic reading must surely concur that it not only successfully encapsulates aspects of British life in the 1980s, as lived by their parents or even older siblings, but equally that it sums up the navel-gazing attitude that's particular to adolescence. Adrian Mole, though, is not a mere navel-gazer: his pseudo-intellectualism means that comedy is found at every turn from the fact that he is not as clever as he thinks he is. This approach to her protagonist makes Townsend's work highly reminiscent of that of the Grossmiths, with the latters' most famous main character (Mr Pooter in another British comedy classic, The Diary Of A Nobody) drawing many parallels with Master Mole.

However, the fifteen-year-old Mole's character assassination is done mainly in kind: we laugh with him, not at him, when we recognise signs of our adolescent selves, and Townsend regularly impels us to empathise with him as his family undergoes fundamental structural changes. As set up in the first volume of the series, Adrian remains an ultimately caring young man who strives for moral decency, and it is this carefully-controlled balance of tender moments and witty one-liners that creates an immensely readable sequel to the original Adrian Mole volume. While not all loose ends are tied up, this is easily forgivable, as many of life's problems are not easily resolved, and this is, after all, a record of Adrian Mole's life (and, indeed, a valuable social record and reflection of our own). It in the end makes for compulsive reading, and readers today need not even wait for the next volume to be delivered, as they can of course finish this volume and, in the next breath, download the next to their e-reader. One wonders what Adrian would say to that.    

other novels by Sue Townsend
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 (1982)
Rebuilding Coventry (1988)
The True Confessions of Adrian Albert Mole (1989)
The Queen and I (1992)
Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years (1993)
Ghost Children (1997)
Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years (1999)
Number Ten (2002)
Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction (2004)
Queen Camilla (2006)
The Lost Diaries of Adrian Mole, 1999-2001 (2008)
Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years (2009)
The Woman Who Went To Bed For A Year (2012)
Public Confessions of a Middle-Aged Woman (2012)

Rebuilding Coventry (Sue Townsend)

--The blurb--
"Coventry Dakin's tale begins with her accidental murder of a man. Forced to flee the law, she deserts her council estate, her boring husband and two demanding children for the anonymity of London's cardboard city."

--The review--
It's difficult to say where or how the old trick of hooking readers via increasingly bizarre or engaging characters' names began: Shakespeare and Dickens were surely early pioneers, while Jasper Fforde continues to hold the flag fly with one of his most famous characters, Thursday Next. Sue Townsend uses this trick in this 1988 novel, allowing the book's title to hinge on it and giving readers extra interest in the protagonist.

This extra interest is certainly needed, for the character of Coventry Dakin is at times a little flat and on the badly-constructed side, as is at times the plot itself. Coventry, and the man with whom she has allegedly had an affair, Gerald Fox, are rather two-dimensional compared with the supporting artists of Coventry's husband and children, Coventry's friend Dodo, the eccentric couple who take Coventry in (Willoughby and Letitia), and Gerald Fox's widow, Carole. Willoughby and Letitia's son Keir is also a rather forced character who adds nothing to the narrative or to the cast of personages that populates the novel.

Equally, the novel's impetus (the murder) is ineffective, and the ending too lacks punch, even though the method by which Townsend commences (in medias res) is more successful. However, this is not to say that this short novel is a waste of time: as previously mentioned, the flip side of Coventry, Gerald and Keir's boringness is more than compensated for by the backdrop of the novella's other hilarious characters, the move from the north to the south of England adds variety, and Townsend's skills in wit and dialogue are certainly no less apparent here than in her other works.

Though on a personal level I find Townsend's The Queen and I to be a preferable novel in terms of both characters, humour and politics, it is worth bearing in mind the difficult task faced by Townsend in the wake of the release of the Adrian Mole series: with such a huge success on her books, the pressure on subsequent works to live up to what has gone before them must be immense. Perhaps some slack ought to be cut.

Other works by Sue Townsend
Womberang (play), 1979
The Adrian Mole series, 1982-2009
The Queen and I, 1992
Ghost Children, 1997
Number Ten, 2002
Queen Camilla, 2006

Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years (Sue Townsend)

--The blurb--
"An accidental celebrity, with a spreading bald patch, despairing of family values, Mole is still worrying: Is Viagra cheating? Why won't the BBC produce "The White Van", his serial killer comedy? Mole, aged 30 1/4, chronicles the closing years of the 20th century with slanderous abandon."

--The review--
It's understandable that the runaway success of the Adrian Mole series when it first came out is perhaps a lot to live up to. The originals sold millions of copies and have been made into television shows, theatre productions and radio plays. They were made into musicals and computer games, and a feature film is planned. So the question perhaps on everyone's lips is whether or not the same esprit is maintained as Adrian passes from youth to adult.

In many ways the answer is no; while The Cappuccino Years is humorous, it is not laugh-out-loud funny and is imbued with predictability in terms of Adrian's character (though perhaps this is inevitable when a series is so long-running). While the series has grown up and progressed in terms of plot and setting (political and otherwise), Moley has not: the gawky teenager is an equally awkward and socially inept adult who thinks as naively and literally as in his teenage years, and it is more difficult to laugh at this in an adult character, where the opportunities for playing on a stereotype are not as plentiful as they are for teenage protagonists. And yet it is this stagnation of Adrian Mole's character that does in fact make this book a good competitor to its companions in the series: his blunders and egotism add ridiculousness and humour to the book, and the novel would probably be poorer without these characteristics. We can visualise Adrian just as well as before, as well as his hapless family and old school friends.

As well as having some humour (in a roundabout sort of way) the book is also touching and generally concise. However, there are two slightly incredulous aspects: one is the 'wife swap' situation between Pandora and Adrian's respective sets of parents (though perhaps this only enhances the comedy further, and so can be excused), and the other is in the novel's general style. It appears that by this stage in the series, Townsend has lost her grip on the diary style. While this would make an excellent first-person narrative, it relies too much on giving background information (which would not normally occur in a diary), and even though, as previously mentioned, the novel is usually quite concise, a few of the entries do ramble on.

These shortfalls therefore do not make this the best book in the series. However, it is worth reading in the context of the others, and it allows Townsend to keep her reputation for what it is she originally became famous for: for providing entertaining, politically pertinent, and touching reads whose doors (or covers) are open to all.

Other works in the Adrian Mole series
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 (1982)
The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole (1985)
The True Confessions of Adrian Albert Mole (1989)
Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years (1993)*
Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction (2004)

*Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years fits here in the series. Published 1999.

The Queen and I (Sue Townsend)

--The blurb--
"The Monarchy Has Been Dismantled; When a Republican party wins the General Election, their first act in power is to strip the royal family of their assets and titles and send them to live on a housing estate in the Midlands. Exchanging Buckingham Palace for a two-bedroomed semi in Hell Close (as the locals dub it), caviar for boiled eggs, servants for a social worker named Trish, the Queen and her family learn what it means to be poor among the great unwashed. But is their breeding sufficient to allow them to rise above their changed circumstance or deep down are they really just like everyone else?"
from www.fantasticfiction.co.uk

--The review--
The ordinary and the extraordinary collide in Sue Townsend's 1992 novel as the Royal Family are ejected from their regal home and moved into council housing on a Midlands estate. The juxtaposition of the country's ex-rulers with the cast of chavdom is naturally amusing in itself, and yet it is not pejorative: even if we, as readers, are so very far away from the classes of people that are depicted, the jibes are good-natured rather than malicious and the focus is on ways in which the novel's characters are alike, not on ways in which they are different. However, the Royal Family's integration is also realistic: rather than fusing the two sub-cultures immediately, the development of how the Royals settle in and adapt to their surroundings is realistically crafted and layered. While the characters are dated, this is easily compensated for by the fact that so many of the situations and settings in which they find themselves are so scarily relevant today.

Townsend also writes very wittily, and given that this is arguably funnier than the Adrian Mole series, everyone should take a look for this alone (regardless of whether or not Adrian Mole is your sort of thing). Perhaps more importantly, The Queen and I is not just an amusingly-written and skilfully-crafted class commentary but is also enjoyable and satisfying as a story for its own sake (you don't have to be interested in the monarchy or politics; from this vantage point, the Royal Family becomes very accessible). However, I wouldn't recommend reading the book's final page - it serves only as a complete cop-out and while I won't say how, I will say that if one of my GCSE students ended a story this way it would be sent back with lots of red pen on it (as one Amazon reviewer put it: "Dude, where's my ending?!"). Nevertheless, The Queen and I is a lesser-known Townsend work that is definitely worth reading. With perhaps the exception of some of the later Adrian Mole instalments, Townsend has proved herself continually to be a solid, reliable writer who can deliver high-quality works that people enjoy reading. Let's just hope that when I get to the sequel to The Queen and I, Queen Camilla, which was released in 2006, it will not only adhere to the high quality standards that Townsend has led us to expect thus far, but also that its ending will be far less bathetic.

Other works by Sue Townsend
the Adrian Mole series, 1982 onwards
Rebuilding Coventry (1988)
Ghost Children (1997)
Number Ten (2002)
Queen Camilla (2006)