Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years (2009) - Plot & Excerpts
I can't deny I've been putting off finishing this one for a while now. Despite its excruciating romantic plots, "...Mass Destruction" once again left Adrian happy and loved. A few years on and reality has come crashing back in with a strained marriage, stroppy daughter, mooching half-brother, son still fighting the Taliban and a failing bookshop pushing Mole back to the safety of his diaries. Things still manage to get worse when Adrian becomes ill. Funny but painful, like it was happening to a close friend, which in many ways, he has become. The ending will probably not satisfy traditionalists, not least of all now it has become the default ending by Townsend's tragic death but then nothing was ever simple in the world of Adrian Mole. You will both be missed hugely. This man is not Adrian Mole. Like the trip to the recreated Anne of Green Gables house when my father asked if the house was “really” where Anne lived, fiction does not live. And what a shame that it doesn’t. There’s nothing I’d like more than to ring round Adrian’s house (well, the piggeries) and find him fastidiously drinking his afternoon tea and waxing poetic about his prostate.But really, finding out that another Adrian Mole book had come out was happy news, and once again, Sue Townsend has delivered a remarkably witty and insightful novel featuring one of my all time favourite male protagonists. What isn’t to love about Adrian? Nothing makes a reader feel more love for a character than feeling smarter and more sophisticated than the (altogether hapless) first person (diarist!) protagonist. But if Adrian were entirely daft I might not love him as I do; instead, it is precisely Adrian’s flaws and vulnerabilities that make him so loveable. The reader at once feels superior to Adrian and identifies with him.For a reader who values character consistency and complexity, Adrian certainly satisfies. And for a reader who values the endurance (and here I mean both in the literal sense of a character who just. keeps. going. and in the sense of a character whose sensitivity and earnestness far surpasses his particular political moment and geographic location) Adrian does not disappoint. And funny. So funny.Note: Adrian Mole, From Minor to Major, (the collection of the first four - or five? - Adrian novels) is the first and only book I’ve ever stolen, and I did it by accident (I swear). I started to read it while in the library, and walked out still reading it (well before the days of electronic door monitors) and forgot to sign it out. Shame.
What do You think about Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years (2009)?
this is one of my favorite adrian mole books. adrian is so likable ... and pandora's always a hoot.
—DeeJ
A mixture of pathos and comic genius. By far the best of the Adrian Mole series
—Mythical
