Adrian Mole: From Minor to Major
I needed to rest my head from its multi-century bounce
between AD 46 and the 1770s, so I decided on what seemed to be historical
(non)fiction’s furthest pole, the lauded Adrian
Mole series by Sue Townsend. At
first, I really wasn’t sure. Then I
resolved that I was going to teach Adrian
Mole as part of curriculum to
Americans training to go to the UK (diplomats, transplants, and interested
parties): I can’t think of many avenues
so comprehensively and idiosyncratically symptomatic of the real British
psyche, though naturally 1981 when Adrian began his diaries is far removed from
us today. But not so far removed.
The Secret Diary of
Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾ is in many places absolutely hilarious and, to use a
thoroughly British phrase, completely mental.
The back of this collected edition, From
Minor to Major, tells us that Adrian Mole diaries “constitute an attack on
all the half-baked ideas of marriage and parenthood.” I wouldn’t phrase is quite like that, though
not having ever spoken to Sue Townsend I have no idea what her thought process
was. I would say Adrian Mole, like some
of the greatest characters in literature, is so utterly successful because we
can all relate to him, despite now being an advanced age and never having been
his gender, in my case (therefore having foregone Adrian’s obsession with
measuring his “thing”). I don’t know
about you, but I was pompous at 13.
Sometimes I did look at grown-ups and certainly at my peers and think,
“Oh the humanity.” Only to me did the
world reveal its revelations and even then I was too young and insignificant to
do anything about them. We can laugh at
Adrian because he acts utterly ridiculous to an outside and rather cooler mind,
but at the same time, it gives us a valuable nugget of humility, as even in
moments in which we find ourselves of turmoil of soap opera dimensions, we need
to put it all into perspective.
I commend Townsend for being able to so easily and
completely assume the authorial voice of a 13 ¾-year-old British boy of the
Midlands. Occasionally you come across
an author who is otherwise masterful, but for some reason their getting inside
the head of certain characters rings false (I had a bit of trouble, for example,
with the way Sarah Waters presented her male characters in The Night Watch). This never
happens in Adrian Mole the first 10
years. Alas, I think the collection
suffers from the fact that as Adrian gets older, he becomes much less
interesting, much less sympathetic, and peters out the kind of character—I must
speculate—populates the writing of Kingsley Amis et al. Furthermore, by 1989, reality seems to have
spun wildly out of control and I feel less and less invested in the characters’
lives.
Much of Adrian’s conflict, humor, and indeed, the source of
the rather improbable turns the narrative eventually takes, is with his
parents. “My father is in a bad mood,”
he writes on January 10th [1981].
“This means he is feeling better.
I made my mother a cup of tea without her asking. This made her cry as well. You can’t please some people!” On the next day, as per his “bad home,” poor
diet, and not liking punk, he decides he is an intellectual. Upon making this decision, he decides to
write some poetry, which he sends to Malcolm Muggeridge[1]. “I showed it to my mother, but she
laughed. She isn’t very bright. She still hasn’t washed my PE shorts, and it
is school tomorrow. She is not like the
mothers on television.” Having recently
read into the history of Britain from 1956 to 1970 and a bit of the 1970s, I am
familiar (and feel I could teach to my hypothetical American class) the
significance of Adrian worrying he will become a “latchkey kid” when his mother
starts looking for work. This gives one
further importance of Adrian Mole; it’s
certainly worth reading as a historical document. Adrian becomes a big reader, and since I was
reading Wuthering Heights[2]
and The Hunchback of Notre Dame when
I was 13 (or younger) I can understand some of his (big, intellectual)
choices. On the other hand, I draw the
line at War and Peace—I couldn’t get
through it at 27, so there’s no way Adrian could have read it within 1
day.
All joking aside,
Adrian’s eventual having to go to school, take care of his father and/or mother
and/or baby sister plus Bert Baxter, his OAP (another footnote for my American
class, that’s old age pensioner = senior citizen), whom he grudgingly likes but
causes him no end of trouble. This is
like Adrian being of a sandwich generation before such a thing was called that,
although a radio play I heard not too long ago makes me think young people as
caretakers for their older dependents, even their parents, is quite entrenched
in British society. Furthermore, I don’t
know exactly what Townsend is saying about Women’s Lib. “It is lousy having a working mother. She rushes in with big bags of shopping,
cooks the tea then rushes around tarting herself up. But she is still not doing any tidying up
before comforting Mr Lucas[3].” As far as I can tell, the days of electricity
rationing were over before Adrian was 13 ¾ , but his father does fail to pay
the electricity bill. “After supper of
cream crackers and tuna fish, played cards in the candlelight. It was dead good. My father cut the ends of our gloves, we
looked like two criminals on the run. I
am reading Hard Times, by Charles
Dickens.” July 1st [1981]
marks the arrival of “brown-skinned” people to Adrian’s neighborhood. On Royal Wedding Day (ie Charles to Diana,
not William to Kate), Adrian writes, “How proud I am to be English! Foreigners must be sick as pigs!” And Adrian weighs in on the recently-deceased
Margaret Thatcher. “Sometimes I think
Mrs Thatcher is a nice kind sort of woman.
Then the next day I see her on television and she frightens me
rigid. She has got eyes like a psychotic
killer, but a voice like a gentle person.
It is a bit confusing.” Furthermore, “Grandma has got a funny look in
her eyes. My mother says it is called
Jingoism, but I think it is more likely to be cataracts forming.” Adrian’s mother’s dour Yorkshire relatives
the Sugdens are also worthy of a sidebar in American class.
Despite moments of clarity, Adrian can be thick (again, in
the English parlance). It takes him way
too long to realize his mother is having an affair with Mr Lucas from next door
and longer still to discover his mother is pregnant. But other surprises we don’t see coming. For example, it’s Adrian’s grandmother who
somehow convinces Barry Kent to stop bullying Adrian[4]. Adrian, of course, reacts in a totally overblown
way. “I bought her a box of diabetic
chocolates as a token of my esteem.” I
read a headline on a magazine at the supermarket counter the other day that
asked, “Are you so much posher than him?” and presumably detailed the dangers
of being posher than your husband/boyfriend.
Pandora, Adrian’s on-again, off-again girlfriend, is certainly posher
(and from a more liberal background) than him.
Due to Pandora, he tries many things he might not have, including
starting a short-lived literary magazine.
They also star as Mary and Joseph in a “progressive” version of the
Nativity play (you can imagine how that goes).
Of particular interest to my American class will be Hamish
Manicini, Adrian’s occasional pen-pal from New York. Hamish is an odd one, because his first
appearances in the books require him to be a hysterical, stereotypical
loud-mouthed gum-popping slang-toting American; it caused me to wonder if
Townsend had ever, at that point, actually met an American. I don’t think she had[5]. I do think she may have, however, in the
extended Mancini letter, in which he gives a list of British-icisms that he
needs translated by Adrian, which Adrian helpfully does[6]. (Nice to know, also, that I missed the roller
skating craze by about 29 years.)
“I have put my name down for the school play. We are doing The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. . . . I hope I get to play Earnest, although
my mother says the handbag is the best part.
She think she’s such a wit.” I am
pleased that Adrian saw fit to laugh at Waiting
for Godot: “Nigel had hysterics when
I said that Vladimir and Estragon sounded like contraception pills.” I’m even more pleased that Radio 4 plays such
a big part in Adrian’s life, even if it is a satirical one (isn’t that rather
like biting the hand that feeds you??).
“There was a good play on Radio Four about torturing in concentration
camps.” Adrian also hears about a
“yukky” woman on Radio 4 who has made millions writing romantic fiction;
therefore Adrian tries his hand at it.
In fact, Adrian begins a correspondence with John Tyneman, then Head of
Drama at Radio 4. Tyneman is more than
indulgent with Adrian, but by the time The
Growing Pains of Adrian Mole ends, things have gotten a bit surreal. I
imagine “Adrian Mole on ‘Pirate Radio Four’” is meant to be funny. Perhaps to someone, somewhere, it is. Furthermore, Adrian Mole in Moscow?! Adrian
Mole and the Amphibians is a real disappointment, to the point where I do
hope the next books in the series are nothing like it.
There are, I confess, a few moments of genuine gooey-eyed
sentiment in this book. For example,
after the birth of Adrian’s much-younger sister, while his father is living at
his grandma’s with a woman he got pregnant, “The midwife came at 2.30 . . . She
asked me who was looking after my mother.
I said I was. She said, ‘I see,’
in a thin-lipped manner. I said, ‘I am
perfectly capable of pushing a Hoover around!’
She said, ‘Your mother needs more support.’ So I took the pillows off my own bed and gave
them to my mother. This act of kindness
made my mother cry.” Furthermore,
Adrian’s entry for December 4th [1982] is my motto for the rest of
life: “I am having a nervous
breakdown. Nobody has noticed yet.” Adrian runs away and lives rough starting on
March 29th 1983. (I ran away
but only to my grandma’s house and I was about six? But it was for the same reason: lack of parental paying attention.) Adrian’s
depressive episode after he runs away is funny and yet recalls my own black
moods, so it’s nice to see it satirized.
So there you have it.
I found most of Adrian Mole to
be hilarious, but the last third seriously needed an editor’s pen.
[1]
By the way, Adrian never hears from Muggeridge.
“Perhaps he is in a bad mood.
Intellectuals like him and me often have bad moods. Ordinary people don’t understand us and say
we are sulking, but we’re not.”
[2] “I am
reading Wuthering Heights. It is brilliant. If I could get Pandora up somewhere high, I’m
sure we could regain our old passion.”
[3] Can a
woman have it all? It’s something still
debated to this day. I lack kids, but
having juggled working part time, studying full time, cooking, cleaning,
shopping, and keeping my affairs in order, I think it’s an unrealistic
expectation to force on women.
[4]
In some of the latter pages, Barry Kent actually becomes a friend to
Adrian.
[6]
See January 1st 1985.
1 comment:
I commented over at your other blog but it was enjoyable to reread your review.
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