Sue Townsend The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ (1982)
I had the first two Adrian Mole books back when I was about the same age as the protagonist. I've now bought them again - my childhood copies having gone the way of my back issues of the Topper, amongst other things - initially so as to take the piss out of Alan Moore*, but also due to the inevitable burst of nostalgia which is apparently common amongst persons of my age. I was just going to read the thing. I couldn't see the point of writing the usual review, and yet here we are…
As I got older, I lost the desire to ever re-read Adrian Mole just as I lost the desire to revisit novels by Douglas Adams or Ben Elton. They seemed like books I'd read before I really read anything. It wasn't that I didn't read as a kid but, excepting stuff I was forced to read at school, it was rare that I read anything either lacking pictures or not directly tied into a TV show. It's therefore probably odd that I never really warmed to either the Mole television adaptation or all of those sequels, The Prostrate Years and so on, all of which seemed like a massive overegging of the pudding.
Coming back to this one now, I realise that not only was Adrian Mole the Harry Potter of my generation - and tellingly rooted in social realism rather than recycled nostalgia - but that he's aged extremely well, possibly because the book is so firmly rooted in its era, and specifically in the problems of its era; also because it's darkly amusing. Adrian's popularity after the fact has somehow given me cause to remember Mole as part of the same twee aspirationally middle-class chortleplex as the works of Jilly Cooper and Carla Lane, but it seems I was mistaken. Townsend, it turns out, had a hard, ordinary life, and most of Mole's troubles are drawn from direct, uncomfortable experience. What I somehow recalled as a series of zingers and not much more, is actually surprisingly gripping, poignant, and still, after all these years, very funny.
My own parents separated at some point not too long after I first read Mole, and with hindsight, the parallels border so much on the uncanny that I can't help wonder whether whoever gave me this for Christmas or my birthday - or whatever - felt it might somehow prepare me for things to come; and maybe it did.
I had the first two Adrian Mole books back when I was about the same age as the protagonist. I've now bought them again - my childhood copies having gone the way of my back issues of the Topper, amongst other things - initially so as to take the piss out of Alan Moore*, but also due to the inevitable burst of nostalgia which is apparently common amongst persons of my age. I was just going to read the thing. I couldn't see the point of writing the usual review, and yet here we are…
As I got older, I lost the desire to ever re-read Adrian Mole just as I lost the desire to revisit novels by Douglas Adams or Ben Elton. They seemed like books I'd read before I really read anything. It wasn't that I didn't read as a kid but, excepting stuff I was forced to read at school, it was rare that I read anything either lacking pictures or not directly tied into a TV show. It's therefore probably odd that I never really warmed to either the Mole television adaptation or all of those sequels, The Prostrate Years and so on, all of which seemed like a massive overegging of the pudding.
Coming back to this one now, I realise that not only was Adrian Mole the Harry Potter of my generation - and tellingly rooted in social realism rather than recycled nostalgia - but that he's aged extremely well, possibly because the book is so firmly rooted in its era, and specifically in the problems of its era; also because it's darkly amusing. Adrian's popularity after the fact has somehow given me cause to remember Mole as part of the same twee aspirationally middle-class chortleplex as the works of Jilly Cooper and Carla Lane, but it seems I was mistaken. Townsend, it turns out, had a hard, ordinary life, and most of Mole's troubles are drawn from direct, uncomfortable experience. What I somehow recalled as a series of zingers and not much more, is actually surprisingly gripping, poignant, and still, after all these years, very funny.
My own parents separated at some point not too long after I first read Mole, and with hindsight, the parallels border so much on the uncanny that I can't help wonder whether whoever gave me this for Christmas or my birthday - or whatever - felt it might somehow prepare me for things to come; and maybe it did.
*: The observations of Jake Butcher, as quoted here, are from the novel Adrian tries to write in Growing Pains - just in case anyone thought that was actually from Jerusalem.
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