Adrian Mole [sound recording] : the prostrate years

Guardian Review

The many readers who grew up with Adrian Mole and consider him a contemporary will be shocked by the latest turn of events in his long-running diaries. "No, it won't be my prostate," he assures the doctor, after ever-more-frequent dashes to the lavatory finally force him to get medical advice. "I'm only thirty-nine and a half." But Adrian has never been lucky - luck's not funny - and in The Prostrate Years he details his experience of the only cancer that makes people snigger. News of his "trouble down there" soon spreads round the village, and everyone has a helpful story. The irritating couple who run the post office weigh in: "We've known half a dozen people suffering from your kind of trouble, haven't we Wendy?" "Yes, and two of them are alive and well today, aren't they, Tony?" Fictional diarists spin much of their comedy out of routine - think of Bridget Jones's daily fags'n'booze tally - and the unwitting exaggeration of tiny concerns. Yet Adrian now has something really worth worrying about, while routines take on a darker hue: the list of days with no entry but "Chemo" signals both the unrelenting slog of treatment and Adrian's lack of energy for his customary anxieties. This isn't black comedy - Sue Townsend cares too much about her characters for that - but it's certainly grim. Yet what is so admirable about this book - and makes it such a piercing, funny read - is the strength of humour that Townsend maintains, expertly avoiding both mawkishness and hollow jollity as she steers Adrian through the strange new world of the oncology department. He panics at being asked how he'd like his tumour to be treated ("I'm not qualified. I only got a C grade in GCSE biology"); is rather pleased with his self-administered Brazilian to "tidy up" the treatment site; and gamely tries on the NHS wigs for "persons of colour" ("I might as well, while I'm here"). Adrian isn't the only one falling apart. His father, after years during which his only exercise was "wagging his index finger on the remote control", is in a wheelchair following a stroke; Mr Carlton-Hayes, revered owner of the bookshop where Adrian works, becomes increasingly frail. Adrian's overachieving brother Brett is brought to the brink of madness and, worse, back to the wretched provinces by the credit crunch. "Bookseller from hell" Bernard Hopkins, whose name triggers an alarm if he applies for a job at Waterstone's, also returns and throws himself on Adrian's mercy; sozzled and near-destitute, he brings fresh anecdotes about his latest suicide attempt and a passion for first editions (Adrian has a weakness for shabby-genteel old men to rival Beckett's). Even blind Nigel's housework dog is not safe, its death only discovered after Nigel has got increasingly angry with its failure to answer the door. Worst of all, though, is wife Daisy's dalliance with the local lord of the manor ("I don't see why women go barmy about Fairfax-Lycett. He is far too tall, looks like a ravaged Hugh Grant and is vulgarly ostentatious with his sports cars and Savile Row tweeds"). After long-distance dreams of Pandora and tragic local girlfriends it was a real, grown-up kind of happiness that Townsend bestowed on Adrian with Daisy and their gloriously stubborn little girl Gracie, and now it's under threat. So it's from an ever-more-vulnerable, insular position that Adrian charts the wider events of 2007/8: the accession of Gordon Brown ("a secret Socialist who will go into Number Ten much as Clark Kent went into a phone box"); the smoking ban; the rise of Jeremy Kyle (on whose TV show his parents discover Adrian's half-sister's paternity); the continuing war in Afghanistan. One strange note in the diaries is Adrian's failure to write to his son, Glenn, who is fighting there; perhaps a comic challenge too far. Meanwhile, he struggles on with his own creative project: a medieval community play entitled Plague! with a cast of 60 and stage directions such as "A carrion crow enters stage right and circles overhead". These are not new jokes, but Townsend continues to spin them brilliantly, and with a vitality and verve particularly impressive in a book about endings, about things closing down (Britain's in the death throes of the New Labour project, while in Adrian's village the bookshop, the pub, the post office, the church - all are going). Believe it or not, she's been writing about ridiculous nativity plays and dreadful Christmas dinners for a quarter of a century now, but the latest incarnations are as fresh as ever. In this book the comedy is all the sharper, and more poignant, for its melancholy contrasts, the emotional danger and the sense that time is always running out. Hitesh, Adrian's colleague at the bookshop, complains as people do every year that Christmas isn't like it used to be. Bernard pats his arm and sagely replies, "Hitesh, old flower, Christmas is exactly the same, it's you who have changed." To order Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years for pounds 17.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop Caption: article-adrianmole.1 This isn't black comedy - Sue Townsend cares too much about her characters for that - but it's certainly grim. Yet what is so admirable about this book - and makes it such a piercing, funny read - is the strength of humour that Townsend maintains, expertly avoiding both mawkishness and hollow jollity as she steers [Adrian Mole] through the strange new world of the oncology department. He panics at being asked how he'd like his tumour to be treated ("I'm not qualified. I only got a C grade in GCSE biology"); is rather pleased with his self-administered Brazilian to "tidy up" the treatment site; and gamely tries on the NHS wigs for "persons of colour" ("I might as well, while I'm here"). Adrian isn't the only one falling apart. His father, after years during which his only exercise was "wagging his index finger on the remote control", is in a wheelchair following a stroke; Mr Carlton-Hayes, revered owner of the bookshop where Adrian works, becomes increasingly frail. Adrian's overachieving brother Brett is brought to the brink of madness and, worse, back to the wretched provinces by the credit crunch. "Bookseller from hell" Bernard Hopkins, whose name triggers an alarm if he applies for a job at Waterstone's, also returns and throws himself on Adrian's mercy; sozzled and near-destitute, he brings fresh anecdotes about his latest suicide attempt and a passion for first editions (Adrian has a weakness for shabby-genteel old men to rival Beckett's). - Justine Jordan.