Adrian Mole and the WMDs

[Guest guest]

Funny sad and funny ha-ha

 

Chris Smith sighs and chuckles in turn as Sue Townsend faces up to the

political realities of the Iraq war in Adrian Mole and the Weapons of

Mass Destruction

 

Saturday November 6, 2004

The Guardian

 

Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction

by Sue Townsend

352pp, Michael Joseph, £16.99

 

 

An Adrian Mole book is bound to be funny, and this is no exception. Not in a

laugh-out-loud-on-the-aeroplane way (though there was one moment when I did just

that), but rather in a quiet-chuckle-to-yourself manner.

 

The characters and setting are inherently comic. Adrian Mole himself:

naive, gauche, setting down inanities as profundity in his diary, but

occasionally snatching at truth in the process.

The loft apartment he has been talked into buying, overlooking the

detritus of the local canal. The swans who have it in for him.[ Rat

Wharf, the fiefdom of a hyperactive swan called Gielgud]

 

The unbelievable amount of debt he accumulates. The clinging Marigold,

from whose clutches he eventually and expensively extricates himself.

The thoroughly dislikable Labour MP, with whom he was once in love and

still is, to a certain extent. The ludicrous " creative writing group "

he's supposed to be in charge of.

 

This is the stuff of caricature, but it's good caricature and is richly

described in a fashion that only Sue Townsend can do.

Her secret, I suspect, is that with Adrian Mole you're always on the

cusp between hilarity and pathos, never quite knowing on which side

you're going to fall.

 

It is all set, however, against the darker background of the Iraq war.

 

This recurs as a theme throughout the book, getting steadily darker and more

ominous as we read on.

 

It begins with a typical Townsend piece of comedy: Adrian Mole demanding his

deposit back on a holiday in Cyprus, because Tony Blair has told him that Saddam

Hussein has weapons that can be dispatched in 45 minutes to Cyprus.

 

It ends with the shocking intrusion of reality, with the death of Robbie in Iraq

where he is serving with his best friend, Adrian's son.

And in between we see the steady progress of the buildup to war, the

military conflict itself and the ghastly aftermath.

 

It's sobering to live through this process once again, seen through the eyes of

an (at first) credulous observer. We encounter the Blair and Bush speeches

justifying war, the assurances that there are weapons of mass destruction and

the gradual change of wording as it becomes increasingly obvious that the WMD do

not, in fact, exist.

 

But more starkly we read the letters home from Kuwait and Iraq from

Adrian's son Glenn; and the brutal reality of what is actually happening on the

ground comes to puncture both the airy certainties of the political speeches and

the strange fantasy world in which Adrian himself is living.

 

The confrontation of fantasy by reality:

this is what the book is about, in Adrian's life and in the background

conflict.

 

Sue Townsend doesn't lose her comic touch, even in the darkness.

Take the " boiled sweet " incident. Glenn has been on patrol in Basra and gives an

Iraqi child a boiled sweet. It gets stuck in the kid's

windpipe, and he starts choking to death. Glenn has to turn him upside

down and shake him about in order to free the blockage and save him.

This is, of course, totally misinterpreted by the crowd around him and

especially by the kid's family.

 

" I can't speak Iraqi and nobody seemed to understand what 'boiled sweet' meant,

so I weren't too popular, " Glenn comments laconically. And Townsend adds: " So

much for winning Iraqi 'hearts and minds'. " This is vintage Townsend. It is

entirely believable. Its elements are richly comic. Yet it points to a

devastating truth behind the surface.

 

Adrian Mole himself develops through the book - from being at the outset a total

believer in the position of Blair and Bush and in the necessity of war, to being

vehemently opposed by the end.

 

The change comes late, and is primarily triggered by Robbie's death.

But suddenly the doggerel that is being written by one of the members of the

creative writing group turns into rather strong anti-war poetry,and Siegfried

Sassoon finds his way into the pages of the Leicester Mercury.

 

By the close of the book, the darkness has taken over, the comedy has

given way to seriousness and Adrian has transformed himself,

Thoreau-like, into a happy family man living off the land on the edge of town.

It probably happens a bit too suddenly, but it's the only sane response to what

has gone before.

 

Ultimately, this book does not tell us anything about the war and WMD

that we didn't know before; but it sets it all up against a personal and family

story that is stuffed full of humour, tragedy, vanity, pathos and, very

occasionally, wisdom.

The conjunction works.

 

It's a refreshing change from the high politics of war-making that has

been the consistent focus of our discourse over the past two years. It

brings it all down to earth. And that, after all, is what Adrian Mole

tends to do for us.

 

My only worry is that it's hard to see where he goes from here. It would be sad

if he were now to be permanently removed from our literary firmament.

 

· Chris Smith is MP for Islington South and Finsbury.

 

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

 

Diary of an innocent

 

Review by ALLAN MASSIE

 

 

 

ADRIAN MOLE AND THE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

BY Sue Townsend

Michael Joseph, £16.99

 

WHEN THE PRIME MINISTER tells the nation that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass

destruction capable of attacking Cyprus within 45 minutes, Adrian Mole, aged 34

and three-quarters, prudently cancels a holiday he has booked on the island,

only to find that his travel agent, Johnny Bond of Latesun Ltd, refuses to

return his deposit of £57.10.

 

Naturally, Adrian writes to Mr Blair asking him to " send a handwritten note

confirming the threat to Cyprus " which he can pass to Mr Bond in order to get

his deposit back. Not even Mr Blair’s failure to do so dents Adrian’s faith in

the existence of WMD.

 

 

 

Adrian is now working in a second-hand bookshop and still, thank

goodness, keeping a diary. His old and never quite relinquished love,

Pandora, is a junior minister in the Department of the Environment.

 

His parents, undergoing a mid-life crisis, are about to opt for the simple life.

He himself has just bought a loft apartment in Rat Wharf,

overlooking the swan-infested Grand Union Canal, and he is going wild on his

credit cards, despite the warnings of his old school-friend Pervez, now an

accountant.

 

Most worryingly of all, his 17-year-old son Glenn, child of his

relationship with Sharon Bott, is about to pass out of Deepcut Barracks and will

be sent, first to Cyprus, then to Kuwait, and then to Iraq itself.

 

There’s worse still. Adrian has stumbled into a new relationship with a girl

called Marigold, who would be the most godawful of beings if it

wasn’t for the stiff competition offered by her father, proprietor of a health

food store, all-purpose loony and member of the UKIP. Marriage looms, especially

when Marigold declares that she is pregnant.

 

Then Adrian’s literary ambitions are stagnating. The Leicestershire and Rutland

Creative Writers’ Group can’t find a celebrity speaker for its Christmas

literary dinner, and celebrities such as David Beckham fail to reply to his

letters requesting an interview in connection with Adrian’s book, Celebrity and

Madness.

 

Throughout his troubles, Adrian remains the same serious, sweet innocent he was

at the age of 13¾.

He is one of the great fictional creations of our time, somewhere

between Voltaire’s Candide and that Edwardian classic, The Diary of a Nobody;

Candide because Sue Townsend, like Voltaire, uses wit and humour to expose and

mock the conventional political pieties of the day:

 

The Diary of a Nobody because, like its authors George and Weedon

Grossmith, Townsend looks affectionately on oddity and the sillinesses

of everyday life.

 

The Grossmiths would, for instance, have been proud to have devised the

correspondence between Adrian and Trixie Meadows, the city council’s

" Neighbourhood Conflict Co-ordinator " , arising from his attempt to get the

council to curb the aggressive behaviour of the swans on the canal.

" You and Mr Swan would be brought face to face, " Trixie writes, " to talk about

your differences. You would meet on neutral territory and our Conflict

Resolution Facilitator would be present. "

 

Alas, this is only too believable, and it is one of Sue Townsend’s great

strengths that she knows just how far to let her comic invention run, and when

to rein it in. She is a wonderfully funny writer, but she never forgets that

life is also painful.

In looking at the idiocy and cruelty and brutality of so much of modern life,she

might echo Byron:

" And if I laugh at anything, ’tis that I may not weep. "

Fortunately we can laugh with her. This book is a joy.

 

©2005 Scotsman.com