Bridget Jones, Helen Fielding’s comic creation, returns in time for Christmas, unusually good timing for a woman whose punctuality is regularly ridiculed by her boss (“Come on Bridget Droopy-Drawers Late Again!”). Her name has become a synonym for a dizzy, relationship-obsessed thirty-something woman; her diaristic shorthand, totalling calories, cigarettes, glasses of Chardonnay, weight and other obsessions, has been copied with flattering regularity. She is daft, shallow and neurotic; she is also endearingly funny in her manic enthusiasms and petulant disappointments. For those who loved her the first time round, the fact that she has not changed much should be a source of satisfaction.
What Fielding does achieve, deftly, is more than mere caricature, and more than simple sex-war slapstick. Bridget’s caustic taxonomies – Smug Marrieds, Singletons, Emotional Fuckwits – and her friends’ obsession with self-help books are grounded in the anxieties of the 1990s dating scene, where sexual etiquette is being permanently negotiated (rather than codified in an Austenesque fashion). The obsession with the possibilities of self-development, spiritual or physical, and its endless deferral, are also very much of our times. When Bridget argues that self-help books are “a new form of religion”, she, as ever, doesn’t have the intelligence to defend the thesis, but she does have a point.
Austen, as before, is Fielding’s model, radically but affectionately updated. Where Bridget Jones’s Diary was based on Pride and Prejudice, The Edge of Reason looks to Persuasion as its marker; Bridget’s romance with Mark Darcy is threatened by a scheming minx, allowing for a reprise of singleton agonies before the desired romantic conclusion. Along the way, in an inspired conflation of various comic strategies, she also interviews Colin Firth, the smouldering BBC Mr Darcy, for the Independent, the catastrophic transcript being printed in lieu of her copy. An unequivocally non-Austenesque episode occurs when Bridget becomes an unwitting mule for a drug smuggler and is imprisoned in Thailand. Fielding maintains the Bridget Jones diary voice, jokes and fatuities and all, while leaving the reader aware that conditions are brutal and her heroine terrified. At this point, one realizes that Bridget’s diary persona can be a defence against the intolerable. The episode is subtly handled by Fielding; she retains humour without debasing the seriousness of the situation, and Bridget’s character is undoubtedly enhanced in the process.
The Edge of Reason offers us all the old faces (Shazza, Jude, Vile Richard, et al) and most of the old jokes, and will no doubt irritate those curmudgeonly readers who think that a heroine should demonstrate role-model virtues. But there is, to be honest, a bit of Bridget Jones in a lot of the women and men – or boys and girls, perhaps – of a certain generation, and to have those aspects so affectionately rendered, and both ridiculed and subversively celebrated, is a welcome treat.