One of the epigraphs to Sue Townsend’s novel Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years is Hamlet’s description of Polonius: “That great baby you see there is not yet out of his swaddling clouts.” It is an early warning that Mole, whose adolescent diaries captivated the nation through the early 1980s, has not changed much, although by 1997 he is thirty years old and preparing to vote in the general election that was going to change everything. Adrian has returned to Ashby-de-la-Zouch near his home city of Leicester for the poll, predicting, with his inimitable lack of vision, that Labour will scrape home by three seats. The motto of Leicester, though Mole does not mention this himself, is semper eadem – always the same.
Adrian Mole’s diaries work, as comedy, at a level of irony; Mole is Pooterish, pompous, anal-retentive (as even his family never tire of pointing out) and something of an intellectual snob (though with little justification). As an adolescent, he had to cope with acne and virginity; as an adult, he has to cope with hair loss and celibacy. The early diaries were especially funny because they captured acutely and quite tenderly the roller-coaster moods of puberty, from grandiose dreams to crushing despair. To find Adrian, at thirty, still writing unpublishable experimental novels (Lo! The Flat Fields of My Homeland, now retitled Birdwatching in the wake of Trainspotting, was remarkable for not using any vowels) and unrecordable radio plays (such as The Windsors, an Archers-style radio soap about the Royal Family), is faintly alarming; as is his continued adoration for his childhood sweetheart, Pandora Braithwaite.
Pandora has been to Oxford University, acquiring a doctorate, and, as Labour candidate for Ashby-de-la-Zouch, is poised to become one of the brightest Blair babes. (“‘I’ve been taken over by ambition,’ she added sadly, as though ambition were a terminal illness.”) She eclipsed Mole in their schooldays, and never let him progress beyond “heavy petting” at that time; in the interim, Mole’s romances have encompassed Sharon Bott (whose son, Glenn, proves to be Adrian’s) and Jo Jo, a Nigerian woman who is divorcing Adrian and leaving him – or his parents – to bring up their child, William. Adrian’s developing relationship with the boys – he is an uncomfortable, unwilling, inept and underfunded parent – is, beneath its grotesqueries and jokes, a tender and affecting one at times, and offers at least the hope that through fatherhood Adrian Mole might at last grow up.
He does not have an especially good model of parenthood to follow, of course. George and Pauline Mole were never, in any of the narratives, a functional couple; their affairs and break-ups were the source of much of Adrian’s priggishness and misery. (In fact, in what must be viewed as the extra-canonical volume, Adrian Mole and the Small Amphibians, his parents divorced with astonishing haste, and she married a young tradesman, but this incident is now forgotten as if it had never happened. That volume, and The True Confessions of Adrian Mole, both knocked a year off Adrian’s age, temporarily, but he is now restored in that respect too.) Sure enough, Pauline is off with Pandora’s father even before the vote is announced, and the family is in crisis again. Only Adrian’s sister, Rosie, seems to have developed positively, into an assertive, foul-mouthed, sexually active and normal teenager.
What, then, is gained by catching up with Adrian, older but no wiser, in 1997? Townsend is an unrepentantly Old Labour supporter, and the Blairite triumph can seem, from that angle, a mixed blessing. As Archie Tate, the formidable socialist pensioner, remarks (but of cappuccino), “It’s a little bit of coffee and a bloody lot of froth”. The book’s political jokes are mildly amusing, yet mostly familiar: the pretentious restaurants (a satirical target as long ago as 1987, with the Comic Strip’s Eat the Rich), media manipulation, Robin Cook’s adultery, Alastair Campbell’s control-freakery, Peter Mandelson’s vanity. Bridget Jones’s Diary is cited and cutely parodied, and Mole himself has discovered that the sixth sense is fashion sense.
But when the thrust of satire is that everything is surface and spectacle, it is hard for the comedy to do more than mimic that superficiality; this book reminds us that satire is a quite conservative genre. The fatalism accompanying Mole, more careering than careerist, through his vicissitudes, is an admission that there are very few political alternatives left. It seems significant that Pandora Braithwaite, the girl who has risen so far from Neil Armstrong Comprehensive, has the middle names Louise Elizabeth. “I wondered”, Adrian remarks innocently, “whether she ever used her initials?” Townsend is always fun with names; the bug-eyed lunatic headmaster in the 1980s was Mr Scruton.
Mole himself moves from being a chef at Hoi Polloi (a toff-owned, expensively downmarket restaurant) to a brief and improbable spell on cable television as the co-host of Offally Good!, a cookery show (Mole, typically, fails to realize he is a stooge, playing the straight man to the show’s real host). When these occupations collapse, debt and dismay pile up, and Mole’s aspirations are buried or burned, until, from the ashes, appear the small green shoots of stoic dignity. Along the way, old characters (and some new ones) do their turns. Everything is a caricature, either because narrated by the often amusing but often myopic Mole, or because the joke requires it.
Pandora sums it up:
Your life is a situation comedy! You’re over thirty, you’re living at home with your mother, you’re frightened of women – you’re a Ronnie Corbett for the nineties!
Indeed, Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years does have many of the attendant virtues and faults of a British sitcom. Adrian is hard to love, and harder still to hold out hope for. Yet, for all his ineptitude and self-delusion, it is difficult not to feel sorry for him. What was funny in the child is rather upsetting in the man; at times, his humiliations seem relentless to the point of cruelty.