Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction

by Sue Townsend Narrated by Paul Daintry

Overview

Adrian Mole is thirty-four and three quarters, almost officially middle-aged, when Mr Blair tells Parliament that Weapons of Mass Destruction can be deployed in forty-five minutes and can reach Cyprus.
Adrian is worried that he might not get a refund on his holiday. But that's not all that is bothering him. There's his odd girlfriend Marigold who has become distressingly New Age. And his son Glenn who is in Deepcut Barracks. Would Mr Blair have been quite so keen if it had been his son manning a roadblock?

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

This fifth installment of Adrian Mole's diary (The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4; Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years, etc.) breaks new ground with its concern for current affairs and its sympathetic treatment of not-always-exemplary characters. Adrian, as usual, is struggling with various relationships and with constant financial problems, always trying to do the right thing, but usually giving in to his baser urges, in love and in spending. He becomes accidentally engaged to dollhouse-building homebody Marigold while spending flirtatious evenings with childhood love Pandora; fires off missives to the likes of Tony Blair and Tim Henman; and works, genuinely, to be a good father, friend and ex-husband to a cast of often bizarre but always human characters. Townsend, author of numerous non-Adrian novels, plays and nonfiction, makes Adrian's adult disorientation palpable as he tries to figure out how he went from hosting a popular television show to working in a failing second-hand bookshop, and copes with the shock of seeing childhood bullies make good and childhood dreams go awry. Arguments about the war figure prominently: one of Adrian's sons is sent to Iraq; his best friend, Robert, is there, too. Adrian's reactions to the war are complex, funny and wrenching. By the time the diary breaks off (on Sunday, July 22, 2004), things are looking up for Adrian and a bridesmaid-and he is considering (to her consternation) writing an autobiography. (Dec.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In Townsend's latest installment of the Adrian Mole series, the feckless pseudointellectual has entered the early stages of middle age, but his judgment has hardly improved. Not only is he engaged to a misanthropic woman who designs doll houses, but he has also accumulated more debt than he could pay off in one lifetime; there's also a sadistic swan that terrorizes him whenever he ventures outside of his fashionable new condominium. As if this weren't enough, Adrian's painfully unsophisticated but good-hearted 17-year-old son, Glenn, has been deployed to Iraq. Adrian's angst over the situation increases with each piece of correspondence with his son, even though the elder man firmly supports Tony Blair's assertion that Saddam Hussein does indeed possess weapons of mass destruction. Townsend's acerbic wit has become even sharper; her brand of humor is more hilarious than nearly everything on television or in the movies today. While the barrage of British cultural references may distract many American readers, and the novel's ending feels a bit too dashed off and tidy, Townsend continues to entertain with her intelligent humor. Recommended for most fiction collections.-Kevin Greczek, Ewing, NJ Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Loveable loser Adrian Mole turns 35 in the latest installment in the British series. Townsend began tracking Adrian's wholly mediocre life in The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 133/4 (1982). Set between 2002 and 2004, this, like the others, takes the form of diary entries. Here a slightly more responsible Adrian emerges. Despite a few setbacks-his cooking show, Offally Good!, has been cancelled, and youngest son William has gone to live with his mum in Nigeria-he's finally moved out of his parents' house. Adrian has bought a posh loft at Rat Wharf and some dangerously white furniture to go with it. He is doing well as an assistant to an antiquarian bookseller and may even have found a remedy for the unrequited love of his life, Pandora Braithwaite, in the form of Miss Marigold Flowers. But happy times have short tenancy-in fact, just a few days. Adrian's initial attraction to Marigold's fragility disappears when he's nearly bored to death during a long tour of her doll houses. But no matter: Marigold tells everyone they're engaged and Adrian seems helpless to contradict her. Likewise, life at Rat Wharf turns out to be less than ideal when the picturesque canal swans begin menacing Adrian, and his upstairs neighbor complains at the noise made when Adrian boils water. Finally, Adrian's credit-card debt is mounting, thanks in part to his "resourcefulness" in taking cash advances on newly offered cards to pay the minimum on others. Things get worse: Marigold says she is pregnant and sets a wedding date, Adrian begins a torrid affair with her sister Daisy and his son Glenn is stationed in Iraq. With her usual dark wit, Townsend skewers the Blair government's search for WMDs, the pervasivehell of modern debt and the everyman's inability to master love. Laugh-out-loud one-liners ensure that even the uninitiated will enjoy Adrian Mole's journey through Townsend's cruel, comic world.

AUG/SEP 06 - AudioFile

In this episode of the Mole Chronicles, we find Adrian, now 34, a staunch supporter of Tony Blair and the Iraq war, up to his eyeballs in debt, and slowly strangling under the passive-aggressive ministrations of Marigold Flower, who is determined to marry him. His parents are living in a tent while converting a piggery, and the swans in the pond outside his rat-infested loft apartment are relentlessly violent. Paul Daintry sounds exactly as one would expect of Adrian Mole as he fills his diary with ineptitude and ordinariness. Daintry's performance keeps Mole infuriating and outrageously funny. Only the lengthy pauses between date and entry are annoying in Sue Townsend's otherwise delicious send-up of a self-involved, unintentionally hilarious subject of the British Empire. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171683986
Publisher:	W. F. Howes Ltd
Publication date:	12/01/2012
Series:	Adrian Mole Series , #7
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

2002

Dear Mr Blair

You may remember me — we met at a Norwegian Leather Industry reception at the House of Commons in 1999. Pandora Braithwaite, now the Junior Minister for Brownfield Regeneration, introduced us, and we had a brief conversation about the BBC during which I opined that the Corporation's attitude towards provincial scriptwriters was disgraceful. Unfortunately, you were called away to attend to some urgent matter on the far side of the room.

I am writing to thank you for warning me about the imminent threat to Cyprus posed by Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction.

I had booked a week's holiday at the Athena Apartments, Paphos, Cyprus, for the first week of November for me and my eldest son at a total cost of £571 plus airport tax. My personal travel adviser, Johnny Bond, of Latesun Ltd, demanded a deposit of £57.10, which I paid to him on September 23rd. Imagine my alarm when I turned on the television the next day and heard you telling the House of Commons that Saddam Hussein could attack Cyprus with his Weapons of Mass Destruction within forty-five minutes!

I immediately rang Johnny Bond and cancelled the holiday. (With only forty-five minutes' warning, I could not risk being on the beach and out of earshot of a possible Foreign Office announcement.)

My problem is this, Mr Blair. Latesun Ltd are refusing to refund my deposit unless I furnish them with proof:

a) that Saddam Hussein has a stockpile of Weapons of Mass Destruction,

b) that he can deploy them within forty-five minutes, and

c) that they can reach Cyprus.

Johnny Bond, who was, according to his colleagues, 'away from his desk' yesterday (I suspect that he was on the Stop the War march), has dared to question the truth of your statement to the House!

Would it be possible to send a handwritten note confirming the threat to Cyprus so that I can pass it on to Johnny Bond and therefore retrieve my deposit? I can ill afford to lose £57.10.

I remain, sir,

Adrian Mole

PS I wonder if you would ask your wife, Cherie, if she would agree to be the guest speaker at the Leicestershire and Rutland Creative Writing Group's Literary Dinner on December 23rd this year. Will Self has turned us down — rather curtly, in fact. We don't pay a fee or expenses but I think she would find us a lively and stimulating group.

Anyway, Mr Blair, keep up the good work.

Saturday October 5th 2002

I viewed a loft apartment at the Old Battery Factory, Rat Wharf, today. Mark B'astard, the estate agent, told me that Canalside properties are being snapped up by the 'Buy to Let' crowd. It is in a great location, five minutes' walk along the towpath from the bookshop where I work. The loft has one huge room and a bathroom with glass-brick walls.

When Mark B'astard went for a pee I could see his blurry outline, so if I buy the apartment I will ask my mother to run me up some curtains.

I stepped out on to the tensile-steel and mesh balcony and looked at the view. The canal lay below me, sparkling in the autumn sunshine. A flock of swans glided past, a grey bird flew by and a narrowboat came into sight under a bridge. When it passed my balcony, a bearded man with a grey straggly ponytail waved and said, 'Lovely afternoon.' I could see his wife in the bottom of the boat, washing up. She saw me but did not wave.

Mark B'astard had tactfully withdrawn while I soaked up the atmosphere of the place. But now he rejoined me and pointed out several original features: the genuine acid burns in the floorboards, the hooks where the blackout curtains were hung in the war.

I asked him what the scaffold-clad building next door was being turned into.

'A hotel, I think,' he said.

He went on to tell me that Eric Shift, the scrap-metal multimillionaire who would own the freehold of my property, had bought up the whole of Rat Wharf and was hoping to transform it into Leicester's equivalent of the Left Bank in Paris.

I confessed to Mark that I had always wanted to dabble in watercolours.

He nodded and said, 'That's nice,' but I got the impression that he didn't know what I was talking about.

Mark looked around longingly at the stark white wall space and said, 'This is the sort of place I'd like to live in, but I've got three kids under five and the wife wants a garden.'

I commiserated with him and told him that, until very recently, I was the full-time father of two boys, but that the British Army was looking after Glenn, the seventeen-year-old, and the nine-year-old, William, had gone to live with his mother in Nigeria.

B'astard looked at me enviously and said, 'You're young to have your kids off your hands.'

I told him I was thirty-four and a half and that it was time I put myself first for a change.

After B'astard pointed out the integral granite cheeseboard in the kitchen worktop, I agreed to buy the apartment.

Before we left I went out on the balcony for one last look. The sun was setting behind the distant multi-storey car park. A fox walked along the opposite towpath with a Tesco's carrier bag in its mouth. A brown creature (a water vole, I think) slipped into the canal and swam out of sight. The swans floated majestically by. The biggest swan looked me straight in the eye, as if to say, 'Welcome to your new home, Adrian.'

10 p.m.

I went into the kitchen, turned the volume down on the radio and informed my parents that I would be moving out of their spare room and into a loft apartment in the Old Battery Factory on Rat Wharf in Leicester at the earliest opportunity.

My mother could not hide her delight at this news.

My father sneered, 'The Old Battery Factory? Your grandad worked there once, but he had to leave after a rat bite turned septic. We thought he'd have to have his leg off.'

My mother said, 'Rat Wharf? Isn't that where the rough sleepers' hostel is opening next year?'

I said, 'You've been misinformed. The whole area is being transformed into Leicester's cultural quarter.'

When I asked my mother if she would run me up some curtains for the glass-brick lavatory, she said sarcastically, 'Sorry, but I think you're confusing me with somebody who keeps a needle and thread in the house.'

At 7 o'clock my father turned the sound up on the radio and we listened to the news. Britain's military chiefs were demanding to know what their role would be if Britain goes to war with Iraq. Share prices had fallen again.

My father banged his head on the table and said, 'I'll kill that bastard financial adviser who talked me into putting my pension into Equitable Life.'

When the Archers theme tune played, my parents reached for their cigarettes, lit up and sat listening to the agricultural soap opera with their mouths slightly open. They are doing things together in yet another attempt to save their marriage.

My mother and father are elderly baby-boomers of fifty-nine and sixty-two respectively. I keep waiting for them to give in to old age and take up the uniform that other old people adopt. I would like to see them wearing beige car coats, polyester slacks and, in my mother's case, a grey cauliflower perm, but neither of them will give in. They are still squeezing themselves into stonewashed jeans and black leather fitted jackets.

My father thinks that by growing his grey hair long he will be mistaken for somebody who used to be in the music business. The poor fool is deceiving himself. He will always look like a retired storage-heater salesman.

He is forced to wear a baseball cap at all times now because he has lost most of the hair on top of his head, causing a youthful folly to be revealed: on his stag night, after he had drunk ten pints of Everards Bitter, he agreed to have his head shaved and 'I am a nutter' tattooed in green ink on his scalp.

Fortunately the stag night was held a week before the wedding, but it explains why, in my parents' only wedding photograph, my father looks like the convict Abel Magwitch from Great Expectations.

My father has had his other tattoos removed on the NHS, but they will not fund the green ink one. For that he would have to go to Harley Street for laser treatment and pay over £1,000. My mother has been urging him to take out a bank loan, but my father says that it's easier and cheaper to wear a cap. My mother says that she can't bear reading 'I am a nutter' when my father has his back turned to her in bed, which is most of the time apparently.

11 p.m.

Had a bath using my mother's quince and apricot aromatherapy oil. The stuff floated on top of the water, looking like the oil slick that killed most of the wildlife in Nova Scotia. It took a quarter of an hour under the shower before I was able to wash the gunk off my body.

Used two mirrors to measure bald spot. It is now the size of a Trebor Extra Strong Mint.

Checked emails. There was one from my sister, Rosie, telling me that she is thinking of leaving Hull University; she is disenchanted with nano-biology. She said that Simon, her boyfriend, needed her full-time help to overcome his crack habit. She asked me not to tell our parents of her dilemma as they were both totally 'prejudiced' about crack addicts.

There were the usual spam deals from firms offering to stretch my penis.

Sunday October 6th

New Moon

My mother moped around the house in her dressing gown all day. At 3 o'clock in the afternoon I asked her if she was going to brush her hair and get dressed. She said,'Why should I? Your dad wouldn't notice if I walked around naked with a rose between my teeth.'

My father sat all day next to the stereo, playing and replaying his Roy Orbison records.

Their marriage is obviously a dead parrot. It is like living in a Bergman film. Perhaps I should tell them that their precious daughter is unlikely to win a Nobel Prize as she is shunning the laboratory and embracing drug rehabilitation. That would liven them up a bit and get them talking to each other. Ha ha ha.

Spent the afternoon writing letters. As I was about to leave the house to walk to the post box, my mother said, 'You are the only person I know who uses snail mail.'

I replied, 'You are the only person I know who still believes that smoking is good for your lungs.'

She said, 'Who are you writing to?'

I didn't want to tell her that I was writing to Jordan and David Beckham, so I hurried out of the house before she could see the names and addresses on the envelopes.

Dear Jordan

I am writing a book about celebrity and how it ruins people's lives. I know what I am talking about. I was a celebrity in the 1990s and had my own show on cable TV called Offally Good! Then the fame machine spat me out, as it will spit you out one day.

I would like to arrange an interview on a mutually convenient date. You would have to come here to Leicester because I work full-time. Sunday afternoons are good for me.

By the way, I was talking with my father about your breasts recently. We both agreed that they are very intimidating. My father said a man could fall into that cleavage and not be found for days.

My friend Parvez described them as being like Weapons of Mass Destruction, and my chiropractor predicted that you would suffer from lower-back problems in the future due to the weight you were carrying on your ribcage.

It is rumoured that you are contemplating having even bigger implants inserted. I beg you to reconsider. Please contact me at the above address. I'm afraid I cannot offer a fee or expenses, but you will of course receive a free copy of the book (working title: Celebrity and Madness).

I remain, madam,

Your most humble and obedient servant,

A.A. Mole

Dear David

Please take a few moments to read this letter. I am not an inane football fan requesting a signed photo.

I am writing a book about celebrity and how it ruins people's lives. I know what I am talking about. I was a celebrity in the 1990s and had my own show on cable TV called Offally Good! Then the fame machine spat me out, as it will spit you out one day.

I would like to arrange an interview on a mutually convenient date. You would have to come here to Leicester because I work full-time. A Sunday afternoon would be good for me.

And please don't take offence at what I'm about to say — perhaps you were away when grammar was taught at school — but you do not seem to know the very basics of grammatical sentence construction, i.e. last night on television you said, 'I seen Victoria on a video when she were a Spice Girl an', y'know, I like said to me mate, I fink I've just saw the gel I'm gonna marry.'

The sentence should read: I SAW Victoria on a video when she was a Spice Girl, and I said to my mate, I think I've just SEEN the girl I'm going to marry.

Please contact me at the above address. I'm afraid I cannot offer a fee or expenses, but you will of course receive a free copy of the book (working title: Celebrity and Madness).

I remain, sir,

Your most humble and obedient servant,

A.A. Mole

Monday October 7th

Rang my solicitor, David Barwell, on the way to work. His secretary, Angela, said,'Mr Barwell is busy having an asthma attack due to the new carpet that has been fitted over the weekend.'

I advised her to expect a correspondence from Mark B'astard regarding the lease on Unit 4,The Old Battery Factory, Rat Wharf, Grand Union Canal, Leicester.

She said bitterly, 'I shan't bother telling Mr Barwell. It's me that does all the work. All he does is sit behind his desk and fiddle with his inhaler.'

I had to wait ten minutes outside the shop; Mr Carlton-Hayes had trouble finding a parking space. I watched him walk up the High Street. He looked as if he was on his last legs. I don't know how much longer he can carry on with the shop. This is just my luck.

He said, 'Terribly sorry to keep you waiting, my dear.'

I took the keys from him and opened the door. Once inside, he leaned against the recent biographies to catch his breath.

I said to him,'If we had a few chairs and sofas in here like I suggested, you could sit down and be comfortable.'

He said,'We're not Habitat, Adrian, my dear, we're booksellers.'

I said, 'Customers expect to be able to sit down in bookshops nowadays, and they also expect a cup of coffee and to be able to visit the lavatory.'

He said, 'A properly brought-up person micturates and defecates and drinks a cup of coffee before they leave their house.'

We had the usual quotient of mad people in during the day. A steam train enthusiast with a ginger beard and sellotaped spectacles asked me if we had a copy of the 1954 Trans-Siberian timetable in Russian. I showed him our Railway section and invited him to search through the mildewed railway ephemera that Mr Carlton-Hayes insists on keeping in stock.

A woman with a crew cut and dangly earrings asked if we were interested in buying a first edition of The Female Eunuch. I wouldn't have bought it. It was in very poor condition, missing its dust jacket, and the pages were covered in annotations and exclamation marks in red ink. But Mr Carlton-Hayes intervened and offered the woman £15. Sometimes I feel as though I work in a charity shop rather than Leicester's oldest-established second-hand and antiquarian bookshop.

However, just as we were about to close a young woman came in and asked if we had a copy of Soft Furnishings for Your Regency Doll's House. As far as I could make out, she had a passably good figure and a not-bad face. She had the thin wrists and fingers I like in a woman. So I spent some time pretending to search the racks.

I said, 'Are you sure such a title exists?'

She said that she had once owned a copy but had lent it to a fellow doll's house hobbyist who had emigrated to Australia, taking the book with her. I commiserated with her and listed all the books I had loaned over the years and had never seen again. She told me that she had a collection of eighteen doll's houses and that she had made most of the soft furnishings herself, including upholstering the tiny chairs and hanging the tiny curtains. I mentioned that I would need some curtains making when I moved into my new loft apartment and asked her if she would be interested. She said the longest curtains she had ever made were only six inches in length.

Her hair could do with a colour-wash to brighten it up a bit, but her eyes are a pretty blue behind her glasses. I told her that I would search the Internet tonight when I got home and asked her to call back tomorrow.

I asked for a name and telephone contact number.

'My name is M. Flowers,' she said. 'I haven't got a mobile, because of the health risk, but you can contact me on my parents' landline.' And she gave me the number.

Mr Carlton-Hayes said, 'She works in Country Organics, the health food shop in the marketplace.'

We went into the back. I counted the takings; Mr Carlton-Hayes sat behind his desk, smoking his pipe and reading a book entitled Persia: The Birthplace of Civilization.

I asked him what had happened to Persia.

He said, 'It turned into Iraq, my dear.'

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction"
by .
Copyright © 2004 Lily Broadway Productions Ltd.
Excerpted by permission of Soho Press, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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