All right, I admit it; I
quite liked this book. It was easily digestible, had a relatively original
style, and did induce me to chuckle once or twice – which, for a comedy, is
about the best you can ask for. I have never seen the film, and due to the fact
that I suffer a mild allergic reaction to the sight and sound of Hugh Grant it’s
doubtful I ever will; thus I went in fresh, having only a vague notion about
what the whole thing would be about.
The eponymous protagonist (fancy words what I learned in
school, which sort of means the hero what the thing’s named after), strangely
enough called Bridget Jones, is a single, unmarried lady in her mid thirties
living the stressful high-life in the bustling metropolis of London during the
1990s. The book itself, in no way hinted by the title, takes the form of her
personal diary through the entirety of a year, and the reader is bombarded with
insight into the character’s day to day thoughts, interactions with friends, disastrous
romantic life, and her insatiable obsession with her own weight. At the
forefront of everything is her own crushed self-esteem, repeatedly brought down
by the fluctuations of fate and her repeated failure to form any kind of
lasting relationship; a state of affairs constantly hammered home by her
interactions with family and married friends, to whom she is seen as some sort
of ridiculous aberration – a woman still single in her thirties. Bridget Jones
then is a tragic-comic hero*, constantly beaten to a pulp by life, the universe,
and everything, yet presented here for our amusement.
One of the things I like most about this book is its sense
of time and place; the day to day life of an English person in the ‘90s.
Communication is still done largely by corded telephones, the video-recorder is
an impossible device to program, numerous mentions of Princess Diana as not
having been canonised, Blind Date,
the Balkan conflict, and not an internet in sight. Okay, this really doesn’t
paint ‘90s Britain in a good light, and it’s not meant to; it’s perfect self-deprecating
humour all about how bleak modern life was at the time (as if it’s not still
bleak nowadays). Helen Fielding clearly understood what the ‘90s was about, and
if I had read this book at the time I was jotting down my wacky theories about
that weird decade a couple of months ago, I might have brought it out as an
exhibit.
The characters then; there’s Bridget Jones herself, who
fulfils the Holden Caulfield role of providing a vivid first-person insight
into her world, and everything else comes further down the queue. Of the other
characters there seem to be millions, too many for me to keep track of, but the
important ones do at least stand out: such as her mother, the arsehole of a
scumbag boyfriend Daniel Cleaver, the two friends Jude and Sharon/Shazzer, and
the gay best friend Tom (I’m not actually sure where or when the gay-best-friend
trope first took root, but here it is in mid-‘90s British popular literature. I
have to say I’m mildly curious if there are earlier examples floating about).
These other characters are mostly there to serve the purpose of adding more
colour and drama to the protagonist’s tale, and aren’t really worth mentioning
any more than that – except for the mother, who does a complete 180 on her
forty-year life as a housewife by leaving her husband for a younger Portuguese
man, goes into a career in television, and hurricanes into her daughter’s life
throughout the book, leaving a trail of chaos in her wake.
The plot is mostly just random things happening, with the
plot-threads of relationship-seeking and mother’s midlife crisis running
throughout until everything is resolved at the end. I’ve heard that it’s a
modern take on Pride and Prejudice,
though I’ve not actually read that yet so I can’t really comment; it has an
actual Mister Darcy, though, and P&P
is blatantly mentioned a few times during the book, so I can fully believe that
claim. Basically Bridget Jones falls for an arsehole, spends much of the book
alternately trying to seduce the arsehole, then resist the advances of the
arsehole, eventually gets involved with the arsehole, realises he’s an
arsehole, dumps the arsehole, and then falls for Mister Darcy, who it turns out
is not an arsehole, which just about sums it up. Does that sound anything like P&P?
So yes, I am moderately in favour of this piece of ‘90s
popular fiction. It’s amusing, insightful, and is quick to read. I don’t even
mind the dodgy punctuation in the name.
________________
* While the word heroine is probably expected here, I
refuse to use this word due to its phonetic similarities to the name of a
certain dangerous and illegal substance, and so I shy away from its use –
either in the lingual or physical sense.
Biblioism
Fielding, Helen. Bridget Jones’s Diary. Picador: Chatham.
(1987 – of which there must be some serious printing error or something: says ‘This
edition published 1987 by Picador’, which was nine years before it was actually
written. It probably means 1997, and somebody just made a hilarious mistake.
[First published 1996]).
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