The Outsider (The Lost Diaries of Adrian Mole 1999-2001 - Sue Townsend)

Member Name: Jake Speed

Product:	The Lost Diaries of Adrian Mole 1999-2001 - Sue Townsend
Date:	02/06/09 (186 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Readable, amusing

Disadvantages: Not as good as the other Mole books

'The Lost Diaries of Adrian Mole, 1999-2001' was first published in 2008 and is the seventh addition to Sue Townsend's long running Mole series of books. This volume goes back in time to plug a continuity gap in the series between 'The Cappuccino Years' and 'The Weapons of Mass Destruction' and is collected from 'The Diary of a Provincial Man' series that Townsend wrote for The Guardian from 1999 to 2001. Mole explains at the start of the book that these diaries were originally taken in an anti-terrorist raid and events in the book eventually explain how this happened. In 'The Lost Diaries' Mole is in his early thirties and an unemployed single-parent with two 'grammatically challenged' sons, living in Ashby de la Zouch near his parents. Adrian is still neurotic, still unpublished, still penniless, and still pining for Pandora, now only a fleeting presence in his life as an ambitious young New Labour MP...

As ever with the Adrian Mole books, the tone is broadly comic with Adrian's comments on events and figures of the age painting a satiric portrait of the era. Foot and mouth, industrial decline, hospital superbugs, Big Brother. The books are about change as much as anything with Mole frequently noticing the world he once knew gradually morphing into something slightly more unfamiliar each year, a universal experience everyone can identify with to some degree. The Lost Diaries vents a mild amount of Townsend's steam on things like overworked cleaners at the mercy of hospital bosses trying to do things on the cheap and the emptiness of the New Labour movement. New Labour are presented as a bunch of egocentric careerists who don't believe in anything except control as the self-absorbed Pandora desperately tries to become a star in Tony Blair's government. The reader though might possibly struggle at times with topical references that are already a decade or so out of date - Robin Cook's ethical foreign policy credentials and 'Nasty' Nick being kicked out of Big Brother, for example.

While always readable and entertaining - it's always strangely comforting to slip back into Adrian's little mundane world - The Lost Diaries somehow feels slightly less essential than the other entries in this series. The fact that this plugs a chronological gap is a slight drawback in that we know what happens to Adrian in future volumes. There is less scope to surprise the reader or do anything too dramatic to Adrian's life. There is a meandering quality to this volume and it feels less substantial than its predecessors in terms of its flow, incidents and overall arc. I'm not sure if the origins of this book from The Guardian articles had something to do with it but it does have a vague thrown together quality at times. The comedy has more of a hit or miss feel than usual. In the book Mole also refers to 'A woman fraudster called Sue Townsend. She has made a lucrative living passing herself off as me' and even comments that a television version of The Cappuccino Years has been trailed on the BBC with Helen Baxendale playing Pandora. The Lost Diaries could probably do without these self-indulgent references because it takes us out of Adrian's world and merely reminds us that Sue Townsend wrote everything. It's not that funny anyway.

In The Lost Diaries Adrian has a vague romance with housing officer Pamela Pigg but it never really goes anywhere and Pamela disappears for huge chunks of the diaries. Pamela seems too similar to other female characters in the Mole books and is another of the childlike oddballs that Townsend frequently seems to throw in Adrian's direction. Topical elements include the foot and mouth crisis, which leads to some variable jokes about the countryside. I was pleased to see Adrian's sons convert to vegetarianism though. One of the funniest jokes involves Adrian playing a prank call on Pandora at the Ministry of Agriculture and pretending to be Norfolk's chief vet. He declares, to great panic on the other end of the line, that a 'beak and claw' outbreak is now out of control!

Elsewhere, Adrian's parents are still the most vivid supporting characters and as dysfunctional as ever with their on/off Burton/Taylor style romance, albeit on a substantially lower budget. Adrian's dad spends most of the book in hospital with a superbug but eventually becomes content with life there and is reluctant to leave! His turn of phrase is as blunt and amusing as ever as he calls Adrian's cucumber sandwiches 'poncy' and declares his cup of tea to be 'as weak as a sailor's arsehole'. The book ends just after 9/11 on a somewhat contrived note - thus explaining the 'lost' diaries. As a nod to the 'fuel crisis', there are recurring and slightly tiresome shenanigans at 'Mohammed's petrol station'.

There are some moments of nostalgia and reflection in the book where Adrian recalls events from the original volumes when he was at school. While there is a 'filler' aspect to these passages, it is nice to take a trip down memory lane with Mole and Townsend makes some amusing additions here and there. We learn for instance that Mrs Elf, Adrian's old teacher, is now in an institution after teaching Adrian and co for all those years. The presence of characters we know from the earlier books, like Adrian's best friend Nigel, is always welcome too when it occurs. In this one Adrian's half-brother Brett (the offsring of Adrian's dad and 'stick-insect') turns up (sadly) near the end of the book and, to Adrian's great dismay, is confident, successful, tall, and a student at Oxford who enjoys mountaineering and kayaking. The envious Adrian's nagging feeling that everyone has had an easier or more enjoyable or more successful life than him means we can always relate to Mole on a basic level. Brett invites himself to Adrian's house where he ends up trying to make a documentary about council estates and ordinary people as if they were another species or something. 'I am not ashamed of living in a council house on a sink estate,' says Adrian. 'I rearranged the bookcase so that he could not fail to see that I was conversant with Dostoesvky, Tolstoy and Chekov.' Adrian is far more fearful that someone should think of him as an uneducated oaf than poor. You sort of wish Brett had turned up a 100 pages earlier because Townsend's writing and jokes seem to perk up over the possibilities with class and comedy that his character provides.

As ever, we also get extracts or info from Adrian's hopeless attempts at fiction, including 'Sty', his comic satire about pigs and his novel about twins Jack and John Towers, an 'allegory' on 9/11. These extracts are ludicrously awful, a tad too much perhaps. I suppose the essential thing about Adrian Mole, apart from his naivety, is that he's a hopeless dreamer trapped in a humdrum working-class world. Despite his sensitivity and cultural aspirations, Adrian is fobbed off with a series of menial dead end jobs by the Job Centre. His tenure working for a side of the road Fast Food van is quite entertaining though - 'I am on my break and sitting on a white plastic chair, writing on a matching picnic table. I am surrounded by lorry drivers and motorists. It is only 11:30 but I am already exhausted. I have been on my feet since 5 am...working in Eddie's has given me a unique glimpse of how capitalism works. Eddie's biscuit tin is the proletarian equivalent of a Cayman Islands tax shelter.' Townsend's own background and history of holding down low-paid jobs while attempting to write give Adrian's adventures an air of authenticity that most writers couldn't get away with.

Overall, The Lost Diaries is very readable and pleasant with some decent laughs. It just isn't as detailed or sharp as the other Mole books and suffers consequently. While I read this in a couple of days and enjoyed it, I was always comparing it to the other Mole books and found it slightly lacking in contrast to the series as a whole. Adrian Mole completists though will certainly want to own The Last Diaries and should find it reasonably enjoyable. Just don't expect it to be quite as satisfying as the other books in the series.

Summary: Could have been better