Book Review: Number 10

Title: Number 10

Author: Sue Townsend

Date: 2002

Publisher: Soho (US)

ISBN: 1-56947-349-8

Length: 277 pages

Quote: "All went well until Mary Murphy asked him if he knew the price of a pint of milk."

British Humour stereotypically tends to escape the ignorant U.S. reader. At least this is true of some authors whose idea of "humour" consists of inside jokes. I know of no U.S. reader who's found it hard to laugh at Lewis Carroll, P.G. Wodehouse, or Douglas Adams. I can't think of any who'd find it hard to laugh at Sue Townsend either, although, just in case there are any "conservatives" who really can't enjoy a joke from the Left, they should know that Number 10 is written from a left-wing position. The Labour Party is supposed to be left of the Conservative Party and Edward Clare's problem, so far as the other characters in this book are concerned, is that he's not.

Edward Clare, whose rise to the position of Prime Minister is not adequately explained, is a shy, sensitive, uptight, goodhearted English gentleman who's always done very well in school and behaved very nicely toward everyone. He can be accused of "having no politics," which is almost true. He doesn't particularly enjoy being Prime Minister and, when it becomes obvious that he doesn't know the price of a pint of milk, he's delighted by the excuse to drive through Scotland and England with the policeman assigned to guard his front gate, Constable Jack Sprat.

Though heterosexual, Edward Clare is the sort of small, thin man who can wear his wife's clothes, and he enjoys trying to pass as Jack's sister Edwina." And Jack...doesn't mind as much as he expected he would. Jack is also shy, sensitive, uptight, and goodhearted, though not (strictly speaking) a gentleman--he's the only law-abiding citizen in his family--and pretending to be "Edwina's" brother is as close as he's ever come to having a close personal friendship. All the characters in this book, including Jack, are comic, but if you like a policeman to be a hero, Jack won't disappoint you. 

Jack and Edward hire a driver called Ali who quickly becomes almost as close to them as they become to one another. Apart from having too many children Ali is every bit as goodhearted as the other two, only perhaps a bit better adjusted emotionally.

If you like a comedy to contain a lot of onstage violence or at least property damage, Number 10 might disappoint you. The closest Edward, Jack, and their driver Ali come to violence, on their male-bonding adventure, is when they "duff up" a polluter. They've just left the home of someone who's been actively sickened by the poison he's spraying into the air, and all they do is "duff him up," leaving him able to get up, walk into town, and gripe about having been knocked off his tractor. How very... British of them. Those who spray poison into the air really deserve more of a Lethal Weapon sort of treatment.

If you find the use of formerly unprintable words funny, you'll enjoy Number 10. Ignorant characters spew obscenities and profanities because they don't know the right words for what they mean; educated characters throw the same words around for laughs. Sentences baby-boomers used to be punished for saying appear on almost every page. Nobody says "shut up" if they can say "shut the **** up." We all know some people who "really talk like that." I wonder whether anybody actually knows quite so many of them, but I find myself putting up with the nasty words for the sake of the jokes.

The scenes that ring thinnest, for me, are the ones where Edward, Jack, and Ali meet working-class people who claim to need more handouts from the government. An illegal immigrant from Albania openly tells Edward at dinner, "It is traditional for the men of my village to travel to Britain hidden inside a turnip truck." Trains and planes don't run on time. Patients in a hospital have to take care of one another because the overworked staff aren't getting to them on time. A middle-aged policeman tells our heroes, "I'm going to have a bad back in two years' time, and because I'll have hurt my back on the job I'll get compo and the full pension." A teenaged single mother living in a housing project, where "some of the younger inhabitants who'd tried prison said they preferred it... there was more to do in prison," beats her toddler not because she's an unfit mother but because she doesn't have free day care. Greedy country innkeepers try to tell boarders that using boarders to do all the skilled work gives the inn "character," while unskilled work is done by people who might have travelled to Britain hidden inside a turnip truck: "You'll have to get on the phone and order more foreigners," grumbles the husband, and the wife whines, "All I said to the foreigners was that it wouldn't hurt to see a smile now and then...that would have earned them tips." A restaurant that advertises "fresh-picked salad...oven-baked bread, traditional farmhouse scones...and a selection of fruit from the hedgerow" orders everything in packages from a frozen food company. The private nursing home where Edward's uncle lives is about to be converted to a plastic surgery clinic, and Edward's uncle confides that he's planning to starve himself before the patients are thrown out. And it's all because the government isn't collecting more taxes from the rich to hand more things to these people and supervise every move they make. 

Townsend doesn't actually say that the government is to blame for having allowed the young single mother to go out on dates, but she comes close. We have people like that in the U.S. of course, but they're not considered normal, and the guilt trips Townsend inflicts on Edward after each interaction with members of his electorate make me wonder...does anyone actually believe that providing subsidized day care is the way to stop people hitting babies?

However, although I suspect Townsend may have given some credence to her characters' neverending whine that poor people (other than Jack and Ali) just can't be expected to become responsible adults, I don't find her elitism interferes with the story. These characters are individuals. Their whines are only slightly exaggerated from the whines of real people in the real world. That two characters whose own experience disproves every whine the parasites utter seem to respect the whining parasites, and take their complaints seriously, strains credibility--because in real life there are layabout parents of one who'll try to tell hardworking parents of five that they (the parents of one) are too stressed to control their angry impulses toward their own babies. There are people who'll try to tell someone who types with two fingers, because he has only the two fingers, that they can't type because one of their ten fingers was injured. There are people who'll try to tell someone living on $200 a month how hard it is for them to live on $2000 a month. They will say these things, and because the people hearing them are too astounded to laugh, it's possible that these people think their whines are being respected and taken seriously. They are so wrong. Still, Jack and Ali are nicer than the average guy and it's possible, too, that they're meant to be some sort of Socialist saints.

Mention should be made of the subplot of Edward's wife, Adele, who is very clever but a known schizophrenic, and who decides to start advocating for the rights of severed body parts to be given proper funerals. If this is meant to be an exaggeration based on the behavior of real pro-life activists, then the end of Adele's story...oh, why bother? Edward dearly loves Adele, but schizophrenics tend to get worse with age. Adele's main function in the plot is to provide another reason why Edward really wants not to go back to Number 10 Downing Street. There are proportionately smaller subplots for each of Edward's three children, too: the boy who wants to be a real Socialist, the girl who's leaning Conservative, and the baby.

Critics hailed this satire as proof that the United Kingdom enjoyed free speech. I would have used that to describe The Queen and I and Queen Camilla; at least in Number 10 the characters are fictional. It's quite an edgy satire, anyway, and laugh-out-loud funny. Maybe it's even funnier if you're a fiscal conservative, identify with Jack or Ali, and think the characters whining for government help are a real scream.

To buy Number 10 or most of the author's other books here, send $5 per book plus $5 per package plus $1 per online payment, via U.S. postal money order to Boxholder, P.O. Box 322, or Paypal to the address you get by telling salolianigodagewi that you're interested in this book, as shown at the very bottom of the screen. Four hardcover books of this size will fit into one $5 package. Some of the Adrian Mole books are available as pocket-size paperbacks; this web site would love to complete your collection.

This web site only wishes Townsend, who wasn't old, were still able to tell us where to send $1 per book.