The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 - Sue Townsend

...make your audience laugh at the expense of your main character", and whether it is Adrian's belief that he is brighter than average or Sue Townsend's wonderful way of putting her character's thoughts down on paper I don't know, but between the two of them they conjure up some priceless lines. Having borrowed some classic literature from the library, Adrian comments (apparently seriously), "I read a bit of Pride and Prejudice, but it was ...
...what is so wonderful about The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole. I have bought or borrowed every single Mole book that Sue Townsend ever wrote, but as he gets older through the course of the series he obviously becomes more aware of himself and - in his own way! - more mature, but I find the teenage Mole somehow endearing. My first introduction to him came when, in Year Eight, our English teacher gave us an excerpt from the October diary entries detailing ... more

I once read that a good rule to apply when writing funny material is, "Never be afraid to make your audience laugh at the expense of your main character", and whether it is Adrian's belief that he is brighter than average or Sue Townsend's wonderful way of putting her character's thoughts down on paper I don't know, but between the two of them they conjure up some priceless lines. Having borrowed some classic literature from the library, Adrian comments (apparently seriously), "I read a bit of Pride and Prejudice, but it was very old-fashioned. I think Jane Austen should write something a bit more modern".

I think that is possibly what is so wonderful about The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole. I have bought or borrowed every single Mole book that Sue Townsend ever wrote, but as he gets older through the course of the series he obviously becomes more aware of himself and - in his own way! - more mature, but I find the teenage Mole somehow endearing. My first introduction to him came when, in Year Eight, our English teacher gave us an excerpt from the October diary entries detailing Adrian's tonsillectomy - being just a little younger than 14 year old Adrian was at that point in the book, our task was to produce a piece of writing in response to the hospital section, as though we were other patients on the ward encountering him. I remember enjoying the challenge of both creating that work and reading about Adrian so much that I decided I had to buy the book. So I did.

My copy of the book, then published by Mandarin, set me back £4.99 in 1997, but the original edition apparently dates back to 1982. So it probably comes as no surprise to learn that Adrian starts his diary on 1st January 1981 and ends it on 3rd April 1982 - I can only presume that the reader is supposed to imagine that he writes his thoughts down in a blank book! Being diary based, the book is naturally written almost entirely from Adrian's perspective and - as perhaps most of us are at thirteen and three-quarters (if anything reveals the pedantic character writing the diary, surely it's that title!) - he is very self-centred. His resolutions are an interesting and rather revealing way to open the novel, since he manages to get nebulous intentions that we would probably all aspire to ("I will help the blind across the road") into the same list as "I will put the sleeves back on my records" and "I will stop squeezing my spots". The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole is quite a short book - some diary entries are just a couple of lines long - and yet, having read the later Mole books (which are much longer) sometimes I think Sue Townsend tells us more about Adrian in 186 pages than she does in the far lengthier last book, Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction.

So let me take you back to the early eighties - I wasn't there because I hadn't been born, but thanks to Master Mole I've been building up a picture of the time when teenagers were playing LPs (or, at least, Adrian was!), when leg warmers were all the rage and when Adrian's entire street held a party to celebrate the Prince of Wales' wedding to Princess Diana. I think that perhaps a little familiarity with the fashions, TV programmes and goings-on of the early 1980s (Duran Duran at the disco, anyone?) might be beneficial to get a full picture of the world Adrian lives in but the average reader would probably get the general idea even without it.

Something that has only dawned on me over the years is the fact that Adrian, his mum Pauline, dad George and a pet only ever known as "the dog" live in Leicester - back when I first read this book, I never really thought about any kind of geographical location and Sue Townsend does manage to make you feel like he could be living anywhere at all in Britain - or at least the Midlands (Adrian mentions on the day after Boxing Day that he cycled to Melton Mowbray in five hours on his bike) - which I have always found helped to make him easier to relate to. He's a bit of an odd character in some ways, but still I feel like he could just be living down the road from me!

Maybe "odd character" is a bit cruel and unjustified - what I probably mean is that, for most of us, the teenage years are often about trying to be popular, trying to be liked, trying not to get targeted because we're "different" somehow. And Adrian is different - a bit full of his own self-importance, carrying around this idea that he's academically superior to his peers ("None of the teachers have noticed that I am an intellectual") and even trying to classify his emotions ("Her name is Pandora . . . I might fall in love with her. It's time I fell in love, after all I am 13 3/4 years old"). If I was reading very deeply into his written thoughts, I might say he tends to sound very slightly sexist, as when he says that Pandora's hair is "long, like girls' hair should be" and when - having learnt that married neighbours have split up - he muses, "Poor Mr. Lucas, now he will have to do his own washing and stuff".

Which neatly brings me to another twist in the plot - if ever there was a character in literature who "couldn't see the wood for the trees", I think Adrian Mole is that character. He comments on Mr. Lucas being left to fend for himself domestically but doesn't see anything at all brewing when, a few lines earlier, he thinks Lucas must have been very upset because his mother goes next door to offer comfort and is still there when his father comes home! In fairness, he does pick up on the situation over the course of a few months, and by the time his father has "made friends with a woman at work", Adrian is developing a more critical eye for detail. I don't think it gives too much away to say that his parents separate temporarily, and that - on returning from a visit to his mother and Mr. Lucas in April - when his father mentions that his friend Doreen Slater visited for the weekend, Adrian realises enough to make the cutting comment in his diary, "I have never seen the woman, but from the evidence she left behind I know she has got bright red hair, wears orange lipstick and sleeps on the left side of the bed". Naive he may be, but I don't think the boy is totally stupid.

I have never been quite sure whether this book is really aimed at teenagers or at a wider audience - I must admit, even though I have read The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole many times since I bought it, repeated browsing has not killed my love of this book and even now (aged twenty-five) I still like to read it. It is probably true to say that I know it so well now that I could almost quote sections if I wanted to, but it's an enjoyable book and one that I think is not too complex on the language side. I imagine that Sue Townsend wanted to appeal to teenagers - and adults - with a variety of reading abilities, or at least (if she didn't specifically try to do this) I think she achieved it anyway. It might sound critical in a negative way to say that the language is simple and easy to digest, but actually I think it's one of its strengths.

Generally speaking the diary entries are relatively brief and quite well mixed. There is a very long entry on Adrian's school trip to the British Museum which he writes up as if it was being documented every five or ten minutes as the catastrophes unfold, and - naturally - plays up the roles he and Pandora assume as model pupils . . . no bias there, then! Alternatively there are some very short entries - one from October, in the days following his tonsillectomy when he has gone into full-scale hypochondriac mode, simply says, "I have been moved to a side ward. My suffering is too much for the other patients to bear. Had a 'get well' card from Bert and Sabre.", and yet even in those few lines I think there is a hidden depth that the reader might spot where Adrian can't see it. Has he actually been moved because his agonies distress the other patients or is his moaning driving them mad, I wonder?

In between all this, Adrian's physical and mental quandaries are dotted throughout the novel, being covered in ways that would probably reassure the teenage reader that their own development is quite normal, but Adrian doesn't dwell on this as Peter Payne (the central character in The Secret Diary of the Teenage Health Freak) does. Instead he just mentions it in passing and, in doing so, Sue Townsend makes such worries seem quite normal and natural. Adrian visits his doctor twice with concerns over swollen nipples and his breaking voice, which results in him moaning to his diary that "Dr. Gray said I was emotionally and physically immature" and that his vocal problems are being dismissed as "adolescent wobble". Both possibly quite accurate, I suspect - I have to wonder if Adrian would make it past the receptionist's "Why do you want to see a doctor?" over the phone, these days!

I think I mentioned when reviewing The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole that I thought the bright, intellectual, promising Pandora Braithwaite makes quite a good contrast to her average-at-everything boyfriend Adrian and his delusions of greatness, and - although the reader doesn't get to hear much directly from her - I feel it does cover a little of the experiences of a teenage girl too, and I suspect that Pandora is probably typical of teenage girls of her time in that she doesn't just hope to have a future that isn't dominated by marriage and family, she practically expects to. One really funny "argument" she and Adrian have that shows up his old-fashioned views (probably shaped by his father George) is when Pandora tells him she doesn't want to get married at sixteen, she wants a career. Adrian's laughable reported answer about a possible "little job in a cake shop" for her is met with a comment to the effect that the only time she will go into a cake shop will be to buy a large crusty loaf!

So, although it is entirely written from a male perspective, thanks to Adrian's careful paraphrasing of other people's words (generally he likes to paraphrase rather than quote word-for-word), I think Sue Townsend put together a brilliant short novel that fleshes out the minor characters in Adrian's life just as well as she sketches out the boy himself, and I don't think there's any reason why female teenagers or adults of either gender wouldn't enjoy the book just as much as boys of the same age as Adrian.  

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