Adrian Mole is back with a vengence! After a lean spell, this anti intellectual nondescript is fighting fit. A member of the intelligentsia he isn't, hapless he is and surprising winner with some of his women he also is!

Adrian is now 34 and three quarters and still living in Leicester. He moves into a new flat with the delightful address of The Old Battery Factory, Rat Wharf ... would you choose to live there?

Money worries are haunting the poor lamb now and he gets himself into a major financial scrape: actually this is a theme that runs through the book.

Marigold Flowers is the daughter of this book's Tofu Toppers: bean curd and sandals brigade. Noxious family as far as we can tell and Adrian falls in with Marigold. Marigold is the product of warped parents and she herself is also warped. It seems inevitable that Adrian will firstly fall in with her and then find it absolutely impossible to fall out with her. The woman haunts him, won't let him go and he has no idea how to "ditch the bitch". She feigns a pregnancy that I imagine every reader will have spotted and is only saved by Marigold's beautiful and much less warped and twisted sister, Daisy. Same family, different species! Daisy is another of Adrian's enignmatic aspects: how can such a voluptuous young lady fall for such a loser? It's his hair and his voice apparently. She's a scream by the way and not to be missed!

Adrian's parents are on top form in this book too: they decide to convert the piggeries into their dream home. All by themselves. Alone. In winter. Living in a tent in the meantime. Of course, father Mole does his back in and is rendered useless so they rope in the hapless helper Animal. There's a hint of infidelity here twixt Animal and mother Mole. Just a hint mind!

Adrian still thinks he's an intellectual but when it comes to the newly formed readers club at the bookshop where he now works, he reveals that he always thought at Animal Farm was a story about a farm and some animals! He is clueless as to what everyone else is talking about at their meetings.

Then Pandora said, 'You foret, Nigel, that I was once in love with Adrian myself.' She took my hand and held it. 'We were both fourteen. We were going to live in a farmhouse and have lots of children. Adrian was going to be an ice cream man during the day and I was going to milk cows and bake bread for him to come home to.'

Suddenly we were both weeping. 'It's that ****ing rice wine,' said Pandora, 'It always does this to me.'

Dr Pandora Braithwaite MP features largely in this book and having long since realised that they are destined never to be with each other, they are still friends. Adrian drools over the lass: Doctor, linguist, politician, junior Minister in Tony Blair's government ... she's got the lot. In the previous volume Pandora was awful I thought; but now redeemed to an extent!

All of modern Britain is in this book, by the way: it is a commentary on early 21st century British life. This includes the you've won £5,000 scam that invloves a 10 minute premium cost telephone call only to learn that you've a year's supply of cat food.

You will read about asylum seekers who become post men, or is that post persons? Anyway, of course they are layabouts who fling their bags full of letters into the canal.

There's the public servant who completely fails to understand Adrian's Swan problem: there are intimidatory Swans living outside The Old Battery Works and Adrian tries to ask the council to do something about them. This exchange of letters is tragi comic.

Adrian's mounting debt problem and the various solutions that pop up from time to time come straight from satellite television that also has shopping channels that sell complete rubbish and that entreat us all the phone the accident life line ...

All in all this is a riotous book that I enjoyed from start to finish. This one is right back in the mould of where Adrian Mole first started: at the age of 13 and three quarters, 21 years ago.

A beg, steal or borrow book but you really ought to buy it.

 

© Duncan Williamson
6 January 2005

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