REVIEW BY DAVE RILEY
Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction
By Sue Townsend
Michael Joseph/Penguin, 2004
460pages, $35
Adrian Mole is no longer thirteen-and-three-quarters, but he still keeps his diary. Adrian Mole is in fact 34 years old, but his determination to chronicle his adventures and changing point of view has not relented. I own up to being one of those who have read all of Mole's diaries these past 20 years and while I think that Mole is a pretentious snob, I love him to bits.
It's people like me who made Sue Townsend one of Britain's best-selling authors of the 1980s. When you read the latest offering in the Mole franchise it is easy to see why. Adrian Mole is a great comic invention whose penchant for ruining his life by dint of melodrama makes reading his diary one of the funniest adventures to be had between contemporary book covers.
Mole is a fool. He's naive. He's shallow. He has no personal insight. His love life is a disaster. Yet the way he makes the world pivot around him for the benefit of his daily dairy feed, who can resist the satirical take Townsend engineers on the cross-generational indulgences in downtown Leicester or Mole's more robust adventures farther afield?
This time around there's a dark underbelly to the writing. Townsend has written previously on the topic of New Labour and now it's Adrian's turn to discover Blairism for himself. Adrian was very thankful that the prime minister (and his lovely wife Cherie, who Adrian invites to be guest speaker at the Leicestershire and Rutland Creative Writing Group's literary dinner) has warned him about the imminent threat to Cyprus posed by Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction".
In 2002, when the diary opens, Adrian Mole is Tony Blair's man — and he stays that way for as long as the weapons of mass destruction (or lack of same) don't make it personal. But their absence does. By July 2004, Adrian, for once in his life, is bought up short.
You have to feel sorry for Adrian because you know how mistaken he is from the start. But we readers of his diaries have the luxury of hindsight. We know how it unravels politically. But poor old Adrian Mole has to make it up as he goes. That's the bitter lesson that infests this book, so that Adrian's tragic comedy — his life, such as it is — is all too familiar. Like a twig on the shoulder of a mighty stream, the consumer durables he so recklessly spends someone else's money on aren't enough to hold back the biggest disaster to ever touch the pages of his diary — all courtesy of the Right Honourable Tony Blair MP, QC.
But fear not. As Adrian informs us on the last page: "Happy people don't keep diaries." If he can accept that, maybe we can too.
From Green Left Weekly, June 8, 2005.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.