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Sue Townsend


Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years

Category: Fiction | Published: 2009 | Review Added: 11-06-2017

Rating: 3 - Worth reading

The Secret Diary of Adian Mole, Aged 13¾ was a publishing phenomenon of the early 1980s. Its subject - the daily tribulations and anxieties of an awkward, introspective teenager - was so rich in humorous potential that it's surprising nobody thought of it earlier. Adrian Mole was an engaging protagonist, a dry but naive observer of the absurdity of the world around him: his dysfunctional parents, his classmates and teachers, and society at large. He fancied himself as a writer, but nobody else did.

There was a follow-up, The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole, which which was just as hilarious and occasionally poignant as the first volume. After that, further Mole diaries appeared at less frequent intervals of five years or so. I didn't pay any attention to these volumes, assuming that with Mole now a grown man, something would have been be lost along with the original concept of the series.

However, I picked up a cheap copy of The Prostrate Years, the last Mole book that Townsend completed before she died, and it turned out that the world of the long-suffering introvert still had humorous life in it. The voice of the diarist is recognisable, but it has shifted convincingly as life has happened to him - a failed marriage, three children, professional instability, money worries, and the continuing indifference of publishers to his literary oeuvre. Mole is more knowing, more cynical and better-read than in his first forays into self-expression. He begins this diary working in a struggling independent bookshop in Leicester, and living with his second wife Daisy and their petulant daughter Gracie in half a converted pigsty in an East Midlands village. The other half of the pigsty is occupied by Mole's volatile, uneducated parents.

Crises domestic, professional and medical loom on the horizon, and with mounting realisation, followed by resignation, Mole succumbs stoically to the blows of fortune. He is saved from despair by his dry humour, hard-won familiarity with disappointment, and support from surprising quarters, including his colleague Bernard (a feckless, good-hearted depressive) and his childhood sweetheart Pandora, currently enjoying the high life as a Labour Member of Parliament.

There is much in The Prostrate Years that works. There are laughs on every page. Sometimes they arise from Mole's droll style ("I am no homophobe, but digging a dog's grave whilst being watched by a dozen or so critical gay men is not an experience I want to go through again."). Sometimes they are laughs of recognition from the observations on modern life's absurdity (the bureaucratic hurdles to be negotiated in getting a doctor's appointment; ordinary people mimicking the phoney emotional gestures of celebrities).

Not all the jokes come off, however. Sometimes the scenarios are too outlandish to be credible or funny, and sometimes the humour is just too predictable. (Mole's parents hide their savings in a fake tin of beans; his Asian colleague's parents keep theirs in a packet of basmati rice - groan.) Mole's attempts at literary writing - he includes extracts of his historical drama Plague! - are unintentionally hiliarious, but when a reasonably erudite thirty-nine-year-old includes stage directions for chickens laying eggs, the jokes feel crowbarred in at the expense of realism or psychological consistency. Certain lines would be comic if they weren't put into the mouths of people least likely to utter them. Adrian Mole's mother, fan of the Jeremy Kyle Show and proud philistine, makes a reference to Dickens; Mole's wife Daisy listens to the BBC World Service, and is portrayed as a semi-sophisticated urbanite, but becomes an addict of Sky TV and EastEnders when she's the nearest person to hand to be the subject of an appropriate gag.

Apart from Mole, and his friend Bernard, the characterisation of The Prostrate Years is unsubtle. Nobody in Mole's entourage holds back, especially when to do so would mean Townsend deleting a cynical one-liner. Meanwhile, the tone of uncouth shoutiness becomes wearing - even, at times, rather depressing.

Townsend's humour is most effective when it's restrained, observant and dry. Fortunately, there is enough of that to make The Prostrate Years an entertaining - and occasionally touching - read.

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