Bridget
Jones:
Mad
About the Boy
Stephanie Merritt
| The Observer - October 12, 2013
Older,
sadder but none the wiser, Bridget Jones remains the quintessential
comic heroine on her third outing
Bridget Jones, you could argue, was the first truly modern comic
heroine. Back in the mid-90s, through Bridget and her friends, Helen
Fielding identified the confusion of a new generation of women and –
crucially – allowed her readers to laugh at it. The books went on to
sell 15m copies in 40 countries, were adapted into two hit films and
turned their heroine into shorthand for a particular type of
contemporary womanhood.
Now the author has revived Bridget, nearly 20 years on, to negotiate a
whole new sexual and cultural landscape. The girlish style has not
changed, despite being 51: Bridget still obsessively logs her weight,
her alcohol units and pieces of Nicorette gum (she’s given up the Silk
Cut); to this litany of guilt she can now add embarrassing texts, tweets
and Botox.
At times this tone (Gah! Hurrah! V v good, etc) makes her sound
annoyingly like a giddy teen, as it always did. But there is a shadow
over this new instalment: Bridget is now a widow and mother of two small
children. Despite the distress of many fans, it’s a brilliant solution
to the obvious problem of a third book. Bridget’s raison d’être is
the quest for a man, so the happy ending she found in The
Edge of Reason must be reversed, returning her to her natural state
of hapless relationships and self-help books. By making her a widow,
Fielding allows Mark Darcy to remain as implausibly perfect in death as
he was in life (killed by a landmine while negotiating the release of
aid workers in Sudan, no less), avoiding any tarnishing of the dream
with a messy divorce and offering plenty of scope for tear-jerking
moments with the children. But she uses these darker notes sparingly;
Bridget’s very British determination to “Keep Buggering On”, as
she puts it, nudges the tragedy to the periphery most of the time, but
it does give the character a poignancy she lacked before.
Mad About the Boy
begins four years after Mark’s death, as Bridget emerges from the
first raw shock of grief to engage with the dating scene again. And how
different that scene looks now – when she was last single there was no
Twitter, sexting or online dating, and a cougar was just a big cat.
Fielding enjoys milking all of these for comic possibilities, though
Bridget’s being such a technological late adopter makes a lot of the
observational comedy sound dated. She’s on surer ground when it comes
to slapstick and there are some lovely set pieces based on
misunderstandings and bad timing – usually when Bridget happens to run
into her son’s disapproving (yet ruggedly handsome) teacher, Mr
Wallaker.
As if to compensate for the cruel blow she has dealt Bridget, Fielding
has made her leading men even more idealised here, but that has always
been part of the character’s appeal – the ordinary heroine who wins
her romantic hero not by being the perfect woman, but by being her
clumsy self.
And why not? It’s fiction. I’ve always been surprised at how
furiously some women work themselves up over Bridget in the name of
feminism. She’s not Minister for Women, she’s just a character in a
romantic comedy, a genre that has always demanded resolution in the form
of lovers uniting. In reviving Bridget now, Fielding has dared to
question the happy ending, and in doing so she holds a mirror up to our
changing values. True love is not guaranteed for life, even in romcoms,
and women in their 40s and 50s are no longer prepared to fade away,
alone and invisible. Bridget chronicles all this in her own inimitable
voice; she is supposed to be ridiculous and often infuriating. But she
is also very human, with all her insecurities, and if you don’t shed a
few tears in the course of this book, you must have a heart of ice. In
the end, though, it’s hard not to feel that Fielding is hampered by
her own legacy. Bridget has spawned so many imitators in the intervening
years that all this ground feels very well trodden. Even so, those of us
who loved her the first time will be glad to welcome her back – big
pants, fillers and all.
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