Missing Mole

It is thirty years since Adrian Mole first hit our shelves. To celebrate, Penguin has re-released the oeuvre with shiny new covers and a celeb introduction from David Walliams for the first of the bunch, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 ¾. But that’s not all. Joining the commemorative volumes is a new Sue Townsend novel, not part of the Mole canon though burdened with a typically gangly title: The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year.
 
It starts with the sort of classic Townsend what-if scenario deployed so brilliantly in two of her other non-Mole books, The Queen and I and Queen Camilla. Then it was royalty on a council estate; here stressed middle-aged mother of two, Eva Beaver, crumbles under the pressures of suburbia and decides to take refuge beneath the sheets. Having packed her twins off to university, Eva undergoes a wonderfully polite breakdown. The first chapter is typical Townsend — so far, so good.
 
Things sour after that. There are some rare flourishes, but even the most ardent fan would struggle to claim this is anywhere near her best work. Townsend has always excelled at pureeing contemporary events (think the wry comedy of Adrian Mole’s letters to Tony Blair in Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction). Towards the end, we get a bit of that as a few laughs are bullied out of Twitter. But that requires a 300-page lead in. Equally, the references that once seemed effortless have become slightly mumsy and strained. A typical one-liner from Brian Junior, Eva’s son, runs: ‘We’re here to work, Dad. If we needed “friends” we’d be on Facebook.’ It is hardly seamless, and so obviously second-hand.
 
More than that, it is the relative absence of Townsend’s usual subtlety that surprises. Part of the reason stems from her trademark storybook-style prose. It works much better in diary form, with all the nuances and ironies of the first-person voice, than it does in the third-person. Here, especially, dud lines abound. A typically tortuous gag runs: ‘They could not have been more amused had Peter Kay himself appeared at the end of the path and launched into a new routine.’ The effortless, almost throwaway wit of former work — ‘I am reading Scoop by a woman called Evelyn Waugh’ (The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole) — is a distant memory. 
 
The novel works best when it sticks to Eva and her dilemmas. Her relationship with Alexander, a wannabe painter, and her feuds with her astronomer husband, Brian, betray moments of the old Townsend wit. But the sections depicting the twins at university and some bizarre excursions into the lives of a Chinese couple, Mr and Mrs Lin, are exhausting.
 
The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year is probably just for those who class themselves as Townsend completists. Choosing between this hefty hardback and an anniversary reissue is like a toss-up between Finnegans Wake and Dubliners. Adrian Mole’s voice remains one of the most funny and unforgettable in modern British fiction. If this new volume does anything, let’s hope it nudges readers back to the Mole canon and some of the best comic fiction in existence.