In Sue Townsend’s hands, comedy doesn’t soften despair; it sharpens it. Her creation, Adrian Mole, is a most perfectly flawed portrait of loneliness and failure.
Many think of the fictional character Adrian Mole as a British joke; the gawky diarist of Noddy wallpaper who agonises over being an unrecognised genius while failing biology. He’s cultural shorthand for Thatcher-era nostalgia, a sitcom character in book form. Yet there’s much more to him than that.
The greatest Adrian Mole book, the one that showcases Sue Townsend’s genius most clearly, is not the best-selling 1980s volumes (or the TV adaptation with the iconic Ian Dury theme song), but Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years (Meuthen, 1993). This is the novel where comedy and despair fuse most deftly, where Adrian Mole’s ridiculousness tips into genuine bleakness, and where Townsend commits herself most fully to her creation. To dismiss The Wilderness Years as a minor sequel is to miss one of the most honest portraits of male failure, loneliness, and anguish in contemporary English literature.
Adrian Mole Gets a Larger Canvas
While the first Adrian Mole books were perfect miniatures of suburban life and implicitly the state of the middle of the nation – a newsagent, a headmaster, a local community policeman, a school bully, a youth club, and a right-on youth-group leader – The Wilderness Years has a much larger canvas. Expanding the setting from Leicester to Oxford and London (with holidays in Moscow and Greece) allows a greater satirical tableau.
At the beginning of The Wilderness Years, Adrian Mole has left home and is living in Oxford, working at the Department of the Environment, while sharing a boxroom in a house with Pandora, who remains as maddeningly unattainable as ever. Having Adrian living in but not attending Oxford is a great device to satirise horny academics (Pandora dates “Bluebeard”, Jack Canvendish, a professor of linguistics who is the same age as her father), the upper classes (Adrian house-shares with Pandora and Julian Twyselton-Fife, “a bisexual semi-aristocrat who occasionally wears a monocle. He strains after eccentricity but it continues to elude him… He looks like a horse on two legs”), and the lifestyle of the professional classes (‘Sorry, darling. I can’t find the small grater, for the parmesan.’ ‘Second drawer down, darling, next to the Aga’).
Now that Adrian Mole is old enough to dream of serious publication, we also get brilliant send-ups, both of his own pretensions and the publishing industry, its gatekeepers and parasites. His novel, Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland “was originally written with consonants only” and is “broadly Lawrentian, with a touch of Dostoevskian darkness and a tinge of Hardyesque lyricism”. (Townsend provides excerpts: it is clichéd bildungsroman garbage.)
His letters to the BBC producer John Tydeman remain classics of the form, where naïve illusions meet jaded realism. (Adrian had faxed the 700 pages of his novel to him, and expected him to adapt it for radio). His attempts to find a literary agent are equally inept, and the writer’s school in Greece that Adrian attends has an organiser, Angela Hacker, who “has been falling down in the bar. The sea is choppy, but I think her lack of balance is due more to the copious amounts of retsina she is throwing down her neck.”
The incestuousness of the British publishing industry, meanwhile, gets a jab. Adrian writes to Pandora saying, “I asked her if she knew you and she said she had met you at Jack Cavendish’s house a few times”. Of course.
Another broader aspect that Sue Townsend beautifully skewers is the UK under John Major. If Prime Minister Thatcher haunted the 1980s books like a demonic spectre (the art teacher being sacked for writing “Three Million Unemployed!” on the headmaster’s portrait of her was a brilliant touch), Prime Minister Major features more directly. His bathetic speech-making, strangulated vowels (“When little John lisped, ‘I want some sweeties,’ etc., etc. Did his father leap down from his trapeze and shout, ‘I’ll give you want!’?”), his junior bank manager appearance, and his remarkable ability to prognosticate ineffectively are all mocked.
The 1980s Adrian Mole books feature the big themes of that decade: unemployment, nuclear anxieties, Greenham Common protests, the Falklands, the SDP/Bennite split in the Labour party (Pandora’s father “comes out” as a Bennite), and feminism (I wager that many readers first heard of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch through Adrian Mole). The early 1990s are equally acutely rendered, demonstrating Townsend’s acute sensitivity to the period. There are car clamps, AIDS anxieties, Stephen Fry, Next sales, Paula Yates, the first Iraq War, building societies, affordable rents in London, and Pizza Hut.
This is a cultural period that has been obscured between the big beasts of the go-go 1980s and the ra-ra Britpop mid-1990s. The Wilderness Years is similarly suffused with the pains of the 1990-1991 recession, Adrian Mole at one point noting “Mr Britten, the greengrocer who supplies ‘Savages’ with fruit and vegetables, came into the kitchen today and told us that he is going out of business next week.” Nice touch there with Mr Britten.
Adrian’s mother, meanwhile, faces near repossession, having fallen behind on the mortgage. (In the UK between 1990 to 1995, around 345,000 homes were repossessed by banks and building societies). Throughout, Townsend’s ability to render the larger canvas recognisable, satirise its follies, and give her characters genuine heart is a thing of wonder.
Adrian Mole: from Observer to Sufferer
In the first three books, Adrian Mole was often an observer of the follies of his parents, from their affairs to his mother’s disaffection at being a housewife (“She still hasn’t washed my PE shorts, and it is school tomorrow. She is not like the mothers on television.”) to his father’s temperament (“He is still ill from not smoking. His temper has reached new peaks of explosion.”).
In The Wilderness Years, however, the narrative eye shifts to him. Adrian Mole experiences heartbreak, grief, depression, unemployment, homelessness, and the various kinds of desperation that haunt the clueless. The first third of the book has him flat-sharing with Pandora, “Bluebeard” and Julian Twyselton-Fife), in that aforementioned box room. He is barely even tolerated, which will strike a chord with anyone who’s been a lodger: your money is welcome, your intrusions on common areas less so. You are half a person, a ghost at the feast. It is unmanning.
The middle third sees Adrian Mole moving from house-share to house-share, babysitting kids who refuse to speak to him, lodging with a woman whose numerous suitors make him deeply uncomfortable (“I found it difficult to initiate a conversation with a man wearing a woman’s negligee and nothing else”), and attending therapy sessions in an effort to overcome his anxieties. Naturally, he self-sabotages this with a severe case of transference, falling hopelessly in love with his therapist Leonora, with the emphasis on hopeless.
The final third takes him to London, and particularly Soho. Adrian Mole works at a restaurant owned by Peter Savage, who “dresses like Bertie Wooster and talks like Bob Hoskins of Roger Rabbit fame.” He has his first meaningful relationship with Bianca, after hilariously failing to see her many, many advances while in Oxford.
She spends the middle third of The Wilderness Years circling him, but his obliviousness reaches its zenith. She passes his door constantly, tells him how bored she is and needs someone to go to the cinema with, suggests bringing a bottle of wine when he asks her to fix the shower, then falls asleep on his bed after “she lay on my bed in what an old-fashioned kind of man could have interpreted as a provocative pose.”
While we can see from the outset that they aren’t suited (she is an engineer and Guns N’ Roses fan), the relationship gives Adrian Mole the chance to experience passion and really humanises him. He finally moves from being an attendant, serving to swell a scene or two, to a young man experiencing the joys of life.
Expertly, though, Townsend pulls the rug from under him immediately afterwards, and his subsequent series of losses and defeats leave him empty, but not hopeless. He is freed to start anew. He has gone through the fire and been tempered. Now he can start his life.
The understanding of the value of suffering is exceptional. It is not enough to live life: we must know what it means to lose all that we value. In the midst of Townsend’s pathos and satire, we get some of the wisest ethical lessons. This is part of what makes The Wilderness Years a triumph. Whereas The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ is a tender savaging, The Wilderness Years is as profound on the human condition as anything you will ever read.
Sue Townsend’s Comedy of Despair
The real change in the Adrian Mole stories is the darkness. Of all the Mole books, The Wilderness Years descends furthest into despair; if not the existential horror of Kafka or Joy Division, then a muted, repressed, and very English portrait of anguish. Indeed, the delight one derives from Sue Townsend’s creation lies in her stories’ deep emotional core, which ranges from bittersweet romance to crushing pathos and encompasses all the complexities of family love.
Adrian’s love for Pandora lights up Secret Diary with the intensity of a first love, besides providing a brilliant class contrast. The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole beautifully captures a family breakup. In The Wilderness Years, the pathos is affecting as never before.
The main driver of Adrian Mole’s anguish is his loneliness. His pathos is more real, more honest, than the violent fantasies critics usually valorise in films like Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. What of the anguished isolation of sensitive young men? They exist silently, on the margins, in libraries, bookshops, and city parks. They are too poor, too unsuccessful, and too isolated to be noticed. They yearn and they throb with feeling, but they cannot touch either tangible rewards of life (women, especially) or the intangible (creative success). Their inner lives feel utterly vivid, their outer lives shambolic, and from that conflict we can get brilliant comedy and desperate bleakness.
The Wilderness Years captures this exquisitely. Adrian Mole moves from house-share to house-share in Oxford, always the “cuckoo in the nest”. His blind dates are predictably disastrous. (“My last blind date ended prematurely when Ms Sandra Snape […] left Burger King in a hurry, claiming she’d left the kettle on the stove. I am now convinced, however, that the kettle was an excuse. When I returned home that night, I discovered that the hem was down at the back on my army greatcoat. Women don’t like a scruff.”).
He is maddened with envy at the literary success of his former bully, Barry Kent. His dress sense is utterly deluded (which is rather ironic, given that blazers and beards are now quite hip). His family mocks his pretensions: “I said, ‘It is highly unlikely that I will see Kent. I do not move in the same illustrious circles as him.’ ‘Which illustrious circles do you move in, then?’ asked my mother. ‘None,’ I answered truthfully.” His social life is nil:
Woke at 8.30, had breakfast: cornflakes, toast, brown sauce, two cups of tea. Collected Sunday Times and Observer. Bianca not there. Dork’s Diary has gone to number seven. Changed into blazer. Walked round Outer Ring Road, came back. Brushed and hung up blazer. Lay on bed. Slept. Woke up, put on blazer, went out, had pizza in Pizza Hut. Came back, lay on bed, slept. Woke, had bath, changed into pyjamas and dressing gown. Cut toenails, trimmed beard, inspected skin. Tidied tapes into alphabetical order, Abba to Warsaw Concerto. Went downstairs. Mrs Hedge in kitchen, in tears at kitchen table. ‘I’ve got nobody to confide in,’ she cried. Made crab paste sandwiches. Went to bed. Wrote up journal.
I can’t go on like this; I’d have more of a social life in prison.
Throughout, these moments are handled with equal amounts of comedy and pathos. Adrian Mole’s cluelessness in dating, at work (the portrait of the petty inanities of the Department of the Environment is the equal of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s mocumentary, The Office) and on holiday (he mistakenly books a week canoeing on the Russian lakes) are both hilarious and sad. Oh, Adrian, we feel, laughing and sympathetic, because we recognise ourselves. (For example, I once booked a day ticket to the Shanghai Masters and somehow failed to notice it was for tennis rather than snooker).
Adrian Mole’s Pathos and Redemption
This sense of despair is part of a larger pattern. (The seasonal shifts are quite deliberate). The Wilderness Years expertly moves from clinging to a former life to exile to false hope to a fresh start. Sue Townsend doesn’t wallow in Adrian Mole’s misery; she gives growth and tenderness without betraying the comedy or the humanity. There are numerous masterful touches of this throughout The Wilderness Years.
When Adrian’s grandmother dies, he doesn’t cry until he goes through her kitchen things, and reaches “her Yorkshire pudding tin. She had used it for over forty years. Stupid to weep over a Yorkshire pudding tin, but I did. I then wiped it dry and replaced it in the cupboard, as she would have liked.” That’s one of the best portrayals of grief in English literature.
While Adrian Mole is mourning his grandmother, his London apartment is robbed (“I am now a man without possessions”). Yet these losses free him. We rise from rock bottom. Shortly afterwards, he meets Nigerian waitress Jo Jo, and we get a sense of his qualities as a man; his kindness, empathy, curiosity, and intelligence:
We ate scones and drank Earl Grey tea and talked non-stop: about ‘Savages’ Nigerian politics; cats; one of her art teachers, who is going mad; Cecil Parkinson; the price of paint brushes; Vivaldi; our star signs – she is Leo (but on the cusp of Cancer); and her girls’ boarding school in Surrey, where she lived from the age of eleven until she got expelled at sixteen for climbing on the roof of the chapel in a protest against the lousy food.
Over a glass of cheap wine, we discussed trees; Matisse; Moscow; Russian politics; our favourite cakes; the use of umbrellas; cabbage; and the Royal Family. She is a republican, she said.
Over a final glass of wine and a plate of bread and cheese, I talked to her about my grandmother, my mother, Pandora, Sharon, Megan, Leonora, Cassandra and Bianca.
Adrian Mole is no longer unmanned. He has become a person. Towards the end of The Wilderness Years, he finally comes to appreciate his parents (always a sign of his development), noting how “My father continues to astonish me with his maturity. He has dealt with all the death paperwork and haggled over the cost of the funeral with commendable efficiency.”
Finally, even Pandora gives him her approval: “She complimented me on how well I was looking and she even praised my clothes. She fingered the lapel of my navy blue unstructured Next suit and said, ‘Welcome to the nineties.’”
Adrian Mole’s story arc is completed by Jo Jo. After their day-long conversation, she says to him, “You’re carrying a lot of baggage.” They correspond while Adrian is in Greece at the writer’s course, then when he flies back to Gatwick airport: “I saw Jo Jo waiting beyond the barrier. I threw all my baggage down and ran towards her.”
That scene is a beautiful closure of the arc. Adrian Mole’s earlier despair was so real that this redemption feels fully earned. In Sue Townsend’s hands, comedy doesn’t soften despair; it sharpens it. That is why Adrian Mole, ridiculous as he is, remains one of the truest portraits of loneliness and failure in English literature.
The Wilderness Years is the pinnacle of the Adrian Mole books because it commits fully to its subject – comedy sharpened into clarity – with the full range of human emotions and experience, and a period portrayal by one of Britain’s sharpest of cultural observers. The Adrian Mole books may feel slighter than most serious fiction because of their readability and comedy, but as portraits of humanity, they are more profound and certainly wiser than the heavyweights who strain to impress. The Wilderness Years is not an 1980s retread, but Sue Townsend at her peak: comedy as clarity, satire as humanity, and despair sharpened into truth.