THE WOMAN WHO WENT TO BED FOR A YEAR

by Sue Townsend – Michael Joseph - NZ$37

Reviewed by The Bookman on Radio NZ National -  June 7, 2012

Sue Townsend is of course the creator of Adrian Mole and in the years between 1982 and 2009 had published eight novels featuring him starting with The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 and ¾ and finishing with Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years. She has also written five other novels and numerous well-received plays. I think it would be fair then to call her a prolific writer. And of course they are all warm and humorous in an exceptionally British way. This year marks the 30^th anniversary of the first Adrian Mole title and I hear Penguin Books are publishing a special anniversary edition to mark the occasion.

This new novel is about is about Eva, a 50 year old librarian who when her twin teenage children leave home to go to university reviews her life and decides it hasn’t amounted to much. She has a boring husband, Dr.Brian Beaver, an astronomer who spends all his time when at home in a complex of sheds in their back garden, she makes all his meals and does all the housework. She has an always complaining mother and a consistently grumpy mother-in-law both living nearby and on pondering all this she disconnects the phone and goes back to bed. And she ends up staying there for a year! She isn’t ill, she isn’t having a breakdown, no she just wants to stop the world and get off.

She gets rid of all her furniture, all her clothes, cosmetics and other possessions. She has the bedroom, now empty except for the bed, painted white – walls, ceilings and floor. And she banishes husband Brian from the bed. She has simply decided she doesn’t want to be the person everyone expects her to be.

All this does not go down well with her family of course and various health professionals are summoned.

I suspect part of Sue Townsend's huge success over many years is because her characters tend to teeter on the brink of ridiculousness and yet somehow manage to retain enough plausibility and ordinariness to make them believable. I think in this book though she has moved from comedic writing to farce and I found some of her characters and situations just too ridiculous to be believable. There were many times when I laughed out loud but there were just as many times when I shook my head in disbelief.

In addition to the two main characters, Eva, love her name - Eva Beaver – and her chauvinistic academic husband Brian, there are a raft of others including their 17 year old twins, who are mathematically gifted, their names by the way are Brian Junior and Brianne; a psychopathic student called Polly; there is Alexander a former high-rolling banker who is now a home handyman and who falls in love with Eva while painting her room white; Peter the window cleaner; the mother and mother-in-law; her husband’s lover, an astronomer colleague named Titania; there is a WW2 fighter pilot with a badly scarred face, and so it goes on. 

Then of course as Eva’s fame grows following an article in the local newspaper and the Twitter and Facebook entries that follow numerous people turn up outside her window and some of them come to play roles in the story.

A huge cast which I occasionally found hard to keep track of.

It is a colourful, complex novel; I guess it is about modern family life, it is quite dark in places and absolutely hilarious in others. It is sometimes poignant, at other times bleak.

I reckon it is a book to borrow from the library rather than one you need to own. 
Unless of course you are a committed Sue Townsend fan who already owns all her earlier books in which case this will need to be added to the collection.


 Adrian Mole titles

• The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ (1982)
• The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole (1985)
• The True Confessions of Adrian Albert Mole (1989)
• Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years (1993)
• Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years (1999)
• Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction (2004)
• The Lost Diaries of Adrian Mole, 1999-2001 (2008)
• Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years (2009)