“And I should tell him all my pain,…”

And I should tell him all my pain,
And how my life had droop’d of late,
And he should sorrow o’er my state
And marvel what possess’d my brain;

(Tennyson, In Memoriam XIV.13-16)

 

Mad About the Boy, the third Bridget Jones book, is confusing. But then, Bridget Jones herself and her narratives are confusing; there’s the original Bridget Jones of the Independent newspaper columns, there’s Bridget Jones of the films, and there’s Bridget Jones of the books. I’m pretty sure that Bridget Jones of the newspaper column had a baby with Daniel Cleaver, and in the books and films she was in her mid-to-late thirties when she ended up with Mark Darcy…so the fact that in Mad About the Boy she’s 51 and has two children of a nebulous age between 3 and 7 with Mark Darcy is…confusing.

Bridget is coming to terms with loss, looking after her kids, and struggling to write a screenplay, a modern retelling of an Ibsen play she is sure is actually by Chekhov–and seriously, at 51 Bridget is still doing shit like that? I loved her at 33-37, or whatever age she was in the first book, but Looking Things Up is something she should be able to do by now. There’s a lot of gratuitous tomfoolery like that, which I think builds more on the frequently idiotic Bridget of the films than the books. There are attempts at skewering Yummy Mummy culture, and the School Run, and Twitter, and so on, which work OK–there could be more of that sort of thing–and the interaction between Bridget and her friends is always fun–again, there could be more of that. The moments that work best are where Bridget ponders her loss and grief, and its effect on her children, though these are sometimes undermined by facile symbolism. Owls. Really?

It’s both an easy and a hard book to read. I laughed a couple of times, and almost cried a couple of times. The times when Bridget is All Grown Up are good because they show growth and touch reality, but also sad because in my head she is always a chain-smoking hard-drinking 35 year old bound up in man-drama and career-crises and solid urban families who questions the crazy world that surrounds her even as she relishes it.

Note: There are some great reviews of this book already up on CBR 6; it’s interestingly drawn quite different reactions. See e.g. Bonnie’s review here and Scootsa100’s review here.