The art of writing: Adrian Mole

Just his luck. Adrian Mole is 30 years old — or 43 and ¾s to be precise. The appreciation of Sue Townsend’s most famous creation has grown into uncritical hagiography. The Mole series is not effortlessly and consistently brilliant as the Blandings or Jeeves and Wooster novels, or Tom Sharpe’s Wilt farces. The later Mole books are too soft and too ‘correct’ for my taste. The Cappuccino Years, for instance, was addled with the complacency that reigned supreme before the recent financial disasters and sovereign debt crises. It was smug rather than funny, building the status quo rather than testing it.

However, the earliest Mole diaries are up there with Diary of a Nobody, Scoop and Right Ho Jeeves in the Hall of Fame. The jokes about adolescence are both charming and hilarious; but Townsend’s genius — and I use that term deliberately — is to use an earnest and innocent voice to make cutting political and social satire.