Title: Adrian Mole the Wilderness Years
Author: Sue Townsend
Date: 1993
Publisher: Methuen
ISBN: 0-7493-1683-7
Length: 277 pages
Illustrations: line drawings by Caroline Holden
Quote: “Pandora has been mine since I was thirteen years old and I fell in love with her treacle-coloured hair...She only married Julian Twyselton-Fife to make me jealous.”
Adrian Mole is beloved on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean but his life history is not exactly the same. This volume, containing Adrian Mole's reactions to the Gulf War, was initially withheld from publication in the U.S., then revised...Meh. He doesn't say anything about the U.S. Army that wasn't being printed in U.S. newspapers, but perhaps it's ruder coming from an Englishman.
A. Mole’s basic problem is that he never learns to think beyond the end of his nose. He’s also a blue-collar boy trying to maintain a white-collar lifestyle, an introvert growing up during a cultural War on Introversion, a late-blooming word-nerd, shy, and clumsy; but those things wouldn’t annoy people as much as Adrian does if he weren’t so selfish. He doesn’t think he’s selfish, tactless, or rude. That’s the trouble. He can’t see anyone else’s point of view at all. He doesn’t know why his signing his name “A. Mole” is funny.
It’s typical of Adrian Mole that, a few months after receiving a letter warning him to stop annoying an editor with his dreadful first novel (he had asked the busy editor to photocopy it for him and send the copy back), he sends the same editor the clunky first scene of his first play.
It’s also typical that he never really gets over Pandora, the yuppie extrovert teenager who joined him in the sort of consensual underage sex act real teenagers got up to in the 1980s. In his way he’ll always love Pandora, and she’ll always be fond of him, such that she even persuades her husband to rent him a room, but no woman could ever enjoy much of his company for very long and Pandora never intended to try. Adrian Mole is sensitive, but only to his own feelings.
And it’s also typical that, at the height of his infatuation with a waitress who has a degree in engineering and wants to be an architect, he takes her home to meet his mother and cracks a joke about her not having “built so much as a Lego tower since university.”
I had the U.S. book and recognized the U.K. book as a rarity at a book sale, and bought it to compare the two. Having compared, I can say that, if you already have one book and aren’t a collector, you’d probably rather spend serious money on something different; there’s not all that much difference between the two versions. If you’ve not already read one version or the other, and you want to laugh, you should definitely read the diaries of Adrian Mole. In a place where others won’t notice your laughing out loud.
To buy this volume or the rest of the series, send $5 per book, $5 per package, plus $1 per online payment, to the appropriate address at the bottom of the screen (details are in the "Greeting" post). The Adrian Mole books were published in several editions of different sizes. There were eight volumes altogether, and at least four will fit comfortably into a $5 package.
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