Critical mass

Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
by Helen Fielding

By Stephen Moss, Guardian Unlimited

Monday November 22, 1999

As you may have noticed, the sequel to Bridget Jones's Diary, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (Picador, £12.99), was published last week. Or perhaps you have been on safari in the Congo, where sales of the first book were, apparently, limited. Bridget, aka Helen Fielding, has been filling the Daily Telegraph (for which she writes a column) with extracts from the new book, answering tough questions from the paper's readers ("What are you doing for the millennium?", "How are things progressing on the movie?") and making guest appearances everywhere else.

There was a flash launch party at the London Hilton (waiters served an enticing combination of Silk Cut and chocolates), and Fielding's publishers were moved to compare her to Jane Austen (too much Chardonnay, perhaps). Some 300,000 copies of the book are on sale in hardback, and there is not much doubt about what will be the Christmas No 1. 

Bridget Jones is undoubtedly a phenomenon. Literary editors have been quick to respond, getting reviews into print in what must have been a matter of days of receipt of the book. The shortage of time is perhaps reflected in the choice of reviewers: all twenty- or thirtysomething women closely connected to the papers in which the reviews appeared. Woe betide the literary editor who is late on this one! 

It was the lead review in the Observer, edging out a set of Nadine Gordimer's collected pensées, and the paper's deputy literary editor, Stephanie Merritt, was in two minds about Bridget's return. "She is still in superb form," she enthused (Picador will have logged that for the cover of the instant reprint). Yet in the same paragraph Merritt was crying enough: "This should be the last Bridget Jones book. Fielding is undoubtedly a master of this particular genre, but it's a genre that's getting tired and she ought to quit while Bridget is still an icon."

In the Sunday Times, which also led on Bridget, Lynne Truss had no such reservations: "The Edge of Reason is... funnier and more accomplished than the original diary... [it] is a glorious read, there is a laugh on every page, and, just in case you were wondering, our heroine has still not finished The Famished Road by Ben Okri. Oh, Bridget Jones, you are moi." Poor Ben - why do people always make fun of him?

The Daily Telegraph's Rachel Simhon was even more gushing - but since Fielding's column appears in the same paper, that is perhaps no great surprise. "Helen Fielding's gloriously feckless comic creation has returned - and just in time for Christmas, too," simpered Simhon. "If you expected a radical departure, you will be disappointed. There is nothing new here, I am glad to say, just satisfyingly more of the same. Huge Christmas sales are guaranteed." Thanks Rachel, I think we've got the message.

Jane Shilling in the Sunday Telegraph was more restrained, and pointed to the dangers ahead. "Though the tone remains spirited, there is the tiniest suspicion of a sense that her creator is beginning to tire of Bridget and a pronounced hint in the final pages of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's desperate attempts to rid himself of Sherlock Holmes. But Holmes, as we know, was not so easily dismissed. And nor, we may assume, will Bridget be."

Fielding used to write more orthodox novels, and presumably wants to again. The notion of a Faustian struggle with her money-spinning comic creation is an intriguing one. Will we see a Bridget Jones III, or will she now embark on her own Famished Road? I think I know which Picador - "this is the fastest-selling book since the authorised version of the Bible" - would prefer.