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"I've got this big fear," says Sue Townsend, "of being boring." Ah yes, well, you would have, wouldn't you, if you had created a character which became a book, which became a bestseller 27 years ago and which, eight books later, was still a bestseller now. If your books had sold more than eight million copies and been translated into more than 40 languages. If you were widely hailed as Britain's leading comic novelist. Yes, of course you'd worry about being boring.
"I'm not a very good friend," she explains. "I'm always convinced that if I ring people, it's going to be in the middle of some important row, or piece of work, so I withdraw before I get boring." In the garden, a squirrel is playing on the grass. Behind the squirrel are chickens. Her daughter, Lizzie, comes in with a cup of tea.
Later a schoolfriend arrives to get a book signed for an auction for a hospice, then a dog named Bill wanders in. There are books everywhere, and computers, and radios. If boredom was an occasional affliction for Adrian Mole, aged 133/4, I doubt it is much of one for Townsend, aged 623/4, - or, indeed, for anyone who knows her. In place of the wizened creature in a wheelchair I'd been half-expecting, wearing dark glasses and tapping, perhaps, with a stick, I find a sprightly woman in a stripy dress and jaunty boots, with red nails and matching lipstick.
If Townsend - registered blind in 2001 as a result of complications from her diabetes - has to hold on to the furniture to navigate her way across a room, she's hardly immobile, and if she can't look you in the eye when she's talking, she can certainly look you in the face. The only sign of the dialysis she receives three times a week is a big plaster poking out of her dress neckline. There is a wheelchair in the hall, but she doesn't use it in the house.
Townsend's last Adrian Mole outing was described as "the funniest book of the year" by one of Britain's top news show hosts. Richard Ingrams, prince of the satirical magazine, Private Eye, called her character "a true hero of our time" - a convincing argument that you've hit a nerve or, to put it more cynically, created a formula that works. The trouble with formulas is that they can get tired.
Richmal Crompton, creator of the Just William books, which were the inspiration for Adrian Mole, kept his boy hero at 11 and, as Townsend says, "there's only so much you can write about a boy of 11. I've kept Adrian going in real time," she explains. "I'm somebody who's fantastically interested in just about everything, and I'm interested in the year we live in now, and the year after that, and Adrian is going to be my barometer, I suppose." Townsend certainly is interested in everything.
When Adrian Mole first burst into the beds and buses and coffee breaks of the world in 1982, he was, like many 13-year-olds, concerned with his spots, his passion for a girl at school, and his disappointingly banal parents. As he lurched through adolescence, nursing a secret desire to be a writer and resentment at the indifference of the girl, his parents, and the world to his talents, he offered a window to Thatcher's Britain, its inanities, quirks and aspirations.
In "the cappuccino years" of the 90s, he had a glimpse of minor celebritydom as an offal chef in a Soho restaurant before a spell of unemployment and then, in the noughties, a job in a bookshop that served as a kind of redemption. Throughout it all, Adrian's innocence was the perfect vehicle for a clear-eyed view of a culture and its mores, often touching, sometimes bathetic and nearly always funny.
At times, the joke did wear thin, as the pendulum swung from satire to social comedy to what can only be described as caricature. But Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction is a winner. It's not just an entertaining glimpse into the psyche and struggles of a sensitive 30-something whose aspirations exceed his grasp, it's also a searing indictment of Tony Blair's government and failed war.
The new book, The Lost Diaries of Adrian Mole 1999-2001, ostensibly precedes it, and is actually a collection of newspaper columns Townsend wrote. "It wasn't ever meant to be a book," she says. "It's exactly as it was. It's different in that I usually start with an overall metaphor and work towards it, and I obviously couldn't do that." And how does she think it compares to the others? "I don't," she says a bit nervously, "think I'm the right person to say." Reviews so far have been favourable, and there is, as always, plenty to enjoy.
Now an unemployed single father, Adrian is immobilised by the surfeit of choice in the supermarket, alarmed by Tony Blair's "feminisation" ("his face has softened, his expression is girly, his hands move as gracefully as a geisha's"), envious of Alastair Campbell's full head of hair and humiliated by his inability to assemble flat-pack bookcases. He wonders whether "the psychological medical establishment" formally recognises "Ikea rage". It isn't as funny as the others, actually, and some of it feels more like parody than satire. But as all of us who lurch towards our weekly deadlines with a feeling of sick failure know, it's a lot to expect that the words you vomit out as the clock ticks should be assembled, untouched, and magically cohere into that structurally challenging form, a novel.
On the issue of satire versus caricature, Townsend winces. admits. "I've got a weakness for comedy names, though I'm fascinated by English surnames," she admits. "Personally, I don't know how people can go round being called Pigg [one of the characters in the new novel is called Pamela Pigg], but perhaps I shouldn't do it." Apart from Townsend's extraordinary sensitivity to the zeitgeist and finely attuned ear for the nuances of spoken language across the classes (a talent used to hilarious effect in her royals-move-to-sink-estate novels, The Queen and I and Queen Camilla), perhaps the vital secret ingredient in the lucrative Adrian Mole formula is failure.
Poor Adrian tries, hopes, aches and fails. He aspires to a loft apartment but ends up in a converted piggery. He wants to be John Updike, but stacks his books instead. How we love him! Adrian, she has said in the past, started off as a version of her adolescent self, but where Adrian, from a lower-middle-class background, set out to be a writer and failed, Townsend, from a working class background (her father was a postman) not only succeeded, she became the bestselling writer of the 80s and, not to put too fine a point on it, extremely rich. So what part of her relates to him now?
"There are people who have written stuff that I've found really hurtful, but on the whole I feel like a golden labrador or something, so I often write about my faults. I use Adrian Mole for that. It's a sort of public criticism. I suffer from all the faults. Need for attention, greed, a kind of myopia, really." And does she ever find the criticism of others helpful? There's a pause.
"I would from an editor, someone who had my best interests at heart. But the people who have criticised my work in a hurtful way have been people who I've thought, 'God, they hate me, they really hate me'." And what of money, success, the thing that took her away from the council estate where she grew up, the estate where many of her friends and relatives still live?
At first, Townsend gave the money away to pretty much anyone who asked. After a while, she stopped. "I realised," she says, "that if you give it away, people resent it, and if you don't give it away, people resent it, so it's an impossible position to be in." So how did she deal with that? Townsend literally wriggles in her chair. "I'm not comfortable with talking about it," she says eventually. "It's not a no-go area, but I just don't know what to say about it." Her heart, it's clear from her books and a few hours in her company, is still with the people she left behind, the people who go largely unchronicled in literature, the people who are still her friends and of whom she would still be one if she hadn't - after a series of unskilled jobs as a single mother - joined a writers' group and started a new life as a playwright and novelist.
And how, I wonder, does this champion of the loser feel about her own portrayal of the working classes? Is she satisfied? Townsend, soft-hearted multimillionaire, thin-skinned satirist, now-blind writer who can see much, much more than most, strokes her cheek and looks away. "No," she says, "because I haven't done them justice. I've made them comical characters, which kind of takes the edge away. I would really like to write a book about what it's really like to live on those estates."
So what stops her? Townsend pauses again. "Finding the tone," she says. "I haven't got the characters yet, though God knows," she adds, with a flash of the spirit that crackled a certain adolescent into life, "there's enough to choose from."
* The Lost Diaries of Adrian Mole 1999-2001 (Michael Joseph, $35)
- INDEPENDENT
