The Lost Diaries of Adrian Mole, 1999-2001 - Sue Townsend

Adrian Mole starts the new millennium at a low point in his life; his previous career as an offal chef and TV presenter has come to an end, he has developed a bald spot the size of a jaffa cake and he is forced to live amongst the underclass on the Gaitskell estate.

Adrian is now a single father to his two boys Glenn and William and parenthood brings new challenges for him. William wants a Barbie hairdressing salon for Christmas and ...
...country running to spare him the humiliation of having his skinny legs on show. Modern parenthood can be a minefield, especially when your children have two different mothers and you are forced to bring them up on a tough estate with bad influences all around them.

All the old characters from the previous Adrian Mole books are there, Pandora Braithwaite is now an MP embroiled in political scandal who uses Adrian as a sounding board ... more

Adrian Mole starts the new millennium at a low point in his life; his previous career as an offal chef and TV presenter has come to an end, he has developed a bald spot the size of a jaffa cake and he is forced to live amongst the underclass on the Gaitskell estate.

Adrian is now a single father to his two boys Glenn and William and parenthood brings new challenges for him. William wants a Barbie hairdressing salon for Christmas and Glenn forges notes from home to the PE teacher asking that he be allowed to wear long trousers for cross country running to spare him the humiliation of having his skinny legs on show. Modern parenthood can be a minefield, especially when your children have two different mothers and you are forced to bring them up on a tough estate with bad influences all around them.

All the old characters from the previous Adrian Mole books are there, Pandora Braithwaite is now an MP embroiled in political scandal who uses Adrian as a sounding board on the voice of the people. The older generation of Moles and Braithwaites continue with their partner swapping and his long lost half brother Brett turns up for a visit.

Adrians life continues much as it did in previous books. His relationship with housing officer Pamela Pigg is a love affair which is doomed to fail, his writing career fails to take off and he is forced to navigate the benefits system and take on menial jobs to survive. He also befriends another pensioner, Mrs Wormington, and and moves her into his spare bedroom. The lack of any cohesive plot or story makes the book fairly weak as it jumps between threads and characters without allowing any of them develop properly.

Adrian Mole doesn't work well as an adult character. The fact that he is still as naïve and deluded as he was when he was 13 and three quarters no longer makes him endearing but rather a pathetic creature. He still writes the same pathetic drivel hoping to get published, is still chasing after Pandora Braithwaite and still thinks of himself as an unrecognised genius. Being socially inept, clumsy with the opposite sex and having dreams of fame and fortune are fairly typical teenage behaviours, most of us grow and develop over the years but Adrian Mole remains utterly unchanged. Theres the hope that the teenage Adrian will eventually find his niche in life but he is the type of adult we that we pity rather than cheer for.

What Sue Townsend does best is take a satirical look at modern British life and the class system. The year 2000 was the year of the fuel strikes and as Adrian gets into a tizz about having to make William walk a whole mile to school then we smile and recognise how ridiculous modern life can be. This was also the year that the first Big Brother series aired and Nasty Nicks eviction is described as modern history in the making and of course Townsend manages to take a few swipes at the royal family. The events of the year 2000 are recent enough to be reasonably fresh in most peoples minds but publishing this book in 2008 seems a rather odd thing to do.

Overall, I was fairly disappointed in this book. It was easy reading and made me smile a bit but the fact that Adrian has now turned into a rather sad, unsympathetic character spoiled it. The story lines were also poor, many of the themes like his parents on/off marriage or befriending an elderly woman just repeated from earlier books.

Adrian Mole will be in his 40s now and you can imagine him bumbling through life as a rather pitiable character whose dreams will never be fulfilled. Lets hope that The Lost Diaries really is the last book published in the series.

The Lost Diaries of Adrian Mole, 1999-2001 by Sue Townsend (ISBN 07181548940 is currently available from Amazon.co.uk for £6.59. 

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