Fiction - Diary of a nobody

Published 25 October 2004

Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction Sue Townsend Michael Joseph, 460pp, £16.99 IDBN 0718146891

Adrian Mole has every right to feel hard done by. Two years ago, he booked a holiday in Cyprus with a company called Latesun. The next day, Tony Blair told the House of Commons that Saddam Hussein could launch an attack on Cyprus within 45 minutes. Fortunately, Adrian had the good sense to cancel his holiday immediately. Unfortunately, Latesun Ltd has refused to refund his deposit.

So begins Sue Townsend's seventh novel about this very British everyman - al-though I had no idea there were so many until I saw all the others listed on the flyleaf. When I was 13 3/4 (or thereabouts), I raced through The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4, and its sequel, The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole. After that, we drifted apart, but having read Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction at a single sitting, I am happy to report that it is just as good as the first two in the series - and now I can't wait to read the four that I missed in between.

Inevitably, Townsend has nothing new to tell us about those elusive WMDs, but she does have a lot to say about the state of modern Britain. Thankfully, her comedy is never heavy-handed. She has a sharp eye for everyday absurdities, and inherent sympathy for her characters. And as in all the best satire, the wit is in the detail.

Adrian Mole is now 34 3/4. He works in a second-hand bookshop in Leicester. He has a bald spot the size of a Trebor Extra Strong Mint. He has just bought an overpriced loft conversion he can't afford at the Old Battery Factory, Rat Wharf (Leicester's Rive Gauche), next door to a rough sleepers' hostel and overlooking a canal full of stolen shopping trolleys. He is besieged by savage swans. His father is a retired storage-heater salesman with an Equitable Life pension who lives in a renovated pigsty. This is the real Middle England - not that indignant country you read about in the Daily Mail, but a modest, amiably useless place, full of unassuming people leading discreetly hopeless lives.

Private Eye had a great deal of fun rewriting Adrian Mole as The Secret Diary of John Major Aged 47f, and the parody worked because Mole comes from the same sort of Britain as Major - a suburban netherworld of biscuit barrels and crazy paving, not a million miles away from the provincial hinterland that Victoria Wood describes. What makes Adrian Mole so funny (and what often made John Major so funny, come to think of it) is that the Britain from which he comes is nothing like the Britain where he now resides. Mole is a perpetual innocent, stranded in a brave new world of internet cafes and DIY superstores. Tellingly, in a rare case of life imitating parody, Major Major, the brilliant autobiography of John Major's elder brother, Terry, sometimes reads like a pastiche of Adrian Mole.

However, the comic character that Mole most resembles isn't John Major (or even Terry Major-Ball) but Charles Pooter, the hero of Diary of a Nobody, written by George and Weedon Grossmith way back in 1892. Like Pooter, Mole is a petty snob, desperate to shake off the small-town philistines who surround him, and acquire a lifestyle of cultural refinement. Yet again like Pooter, he is far too honourable and kind-hearted for you to wish him any harm.

I finished this breezy book having thoroughly enjoyed my reunion with Mole, and wondering why on earth I ever lost interest in his dormitory-town adventures. On reflection, I think I must have decided he was a bit babyish, and concluded that I would look a lot more hip and trendy reading books like The Catcher in the Rye (or carrying them around the student union, anyway). The irony - which completely escaped me at the time - is that this is exactly the sort of thing Adrian Mole would do.

In fact, Mole has just as much to say about the human condition as Holden Caulfield - rather more, if you're hanging around in Ashby de la Zouch rather than Manhattan. And unlike J D Salinger, Townsend has nursed her greatest character from adolescence into adulthood. Comic characters who start off as child-ren usually refuse to grow up (Richmal Crompton's William was 11 years old from the early 1920s until the late 1960s), but although the thirtysomething Mole retains the wide-eyed naivety of his teenage prototype, he is a perfectly plausible adult all the same. After all, he wasn't the grown-up who was naive enough to believe in WMDs.

"Mr Blair looks at the camera lens with such a knowing expression, as if to say, I am privy to top-secret information, I know more than I can say," records Mole in his diary. "That is why the British people must trust Mr Blair."

William Cook is the editor of Goodbye Again: the definitive Peter Cook and Dudley Moore (Century)

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