For a little while there, I was sure I was Adrian Mole. I got a copy of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 from my parents after they took a trip to the UK, and it was one of the best gifts I ever got.
I started reading Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole books when I was about 13, the same age as the fictional Adrian, and while I wasn’t quite as awkward and pretentious I was probably a close second. Adrian’s chatty diaries spoke to me, of his dreams of literary greatness, quickly rising and falling passions and his unspeakable social awkwardness. While I was a kid in sunny middle class California and he was a battler in Thatcher’s grey Britain, I felt a kinship with Adrian.
Adrian didn’t become a literary superstar, but over the course of several books he’d become a chef, a TV personality, an activist, a bookstore worker and more, surrounded by a cast including his dysfunctional parents, his strange romantic pairings and eventually his children, and always, the love of his life Pandora, his teenage crush grown up into a headline-grabbing Labour MP.
Townsend followed Adrian well into the next century in titles like Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years and Adrian Mole And The Weapons of Mass Destruction. The satire got broader on topics like the Gulf War and the books generally got a bit less realistic compared to the early teenage angst years, but they were still fun, with Adrian’s distinct combination of snobbery and naivete always amusing.
Townsend, long in failing health, died in 2014. The series came to a halt with Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years in 2009, as Adrian’s marriage breaks up and he discovers he has cancer.
It ends on an optimistic enough note, with Pandora once again popping into his life and a reminder in its final pages that no matter what, life keeps moving along: “Diary, my first thought that I couldn’t possibly be a grandfather, I was only forty years old. My second thought was that I wanted to live long enough to see this child grow up. I had a lot to teach it.”
There were rumours Townsend was working on another book but 10 years after her death nothing has ever been published. I miss Adrian Mole a lot.
There’s something about following a character over the span of a lifetime that makes a book really come alive. I would have liked to see Adrian continue to grow old and cranky and what he would have had to say about Brexit, Trump, Covid and social media. (I’m quite certain he would have fallen for every conspiracy theory there is, actually.) The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, aged 57 3/4? I’d love to see it.
A book series that ends too soon feels a bit like an entire world has been lost.
The late Octavia Butler was one of our most fascinating sci-fi writers and futurists before her untimely death at just 58. Her “Earthseed” series – Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents – follows a young Black empathic woman in an America that is rapidly falling to pieces. Written in the 1990s, it’s gained a new audience in recent years because so much of it seems uncannily prescient – beginning in 2024, it features climate change disruptions, violent inequality, and a presidential candidate whose slogan is “Make America Great Again” (!!!). The two books are excellent reading, and a third book, “Parable of the Trickster,” would have taken the series into the stars, but got mired in writer’s block before Butler died. The whole Earthseed series was building toward leaving Earth, so it’s a real loss we never got to see what Butler had in mind.
I worry about projects where the driving force is aging as they strive to complete it, like Robert A Caro’s magnificent epic biography of President Lyndon B. Johnson, which is four volumes and 3000 pages in and one of the finest biographies I’ve ever read. Caro has been working on the fifth and final volume covering the final decade of LBJ’s life ever since the last one came out in 2012, but, he’s also now 88 years old. It seems selfish to root for someone to stay with us so you can read a book, but that’s how good Caro’s series is. I’m sure even if Mr Caro does pass away, as we all must in the end, the final LBJ book will come out in some form or another, but us Caro-fans are still a bit nervous.
And unlike friend Bob, I have to admit I’ve kind of long given up on George RR Martin ever finishing the Song Of Ice and Fire series, going on 13 years now since the last book, long enough that the entire TV series adapting it came and went. The dragons were cool, but I have to admit Adrian Mole always spoke to me a lot more than Tyrion Lannister.
There’s many a movie or music project that have ended up in “development hell” and never eventuated but it’s not quite the same as a book series. Unfinished book series seem almost like a personal loss, perhaps because you invest more of yourself in thousands of words following beloved characters, and leaving the characters or subjects hanging just reeks so strongly of the endless void.
An empty page is both promising and terrifying, and it’s a loss when you know there was surely more to come, if only things had been a bit different.
Nik Dirga 