Bridget
Jones: The Edge of Reason
Helen Fielding
352pp, Viking, 2000, $24.95
She's back. The neurotic It-Girl who jumped from the pages of a
newspaper column to bestsellerdom a couple of years ago. This sequel
to the massive mega-hit (soon to be a movie etc) Bridget Jones's
Diary has more of the good stuff from the original: the yo-yoing
weight statistics; the calories, real and imagined; the insane family;
the friends/support group and the fantasizing about - and this time
meeting - Colin Firth, he who played Mr. Darcy in the BBC production
of Pride and Prejudice.
Not a lot has changed since the first installment. At the end of
that she had gained a steady squeeze, the steady, competent Mark
Darcy (any similarity in names would be strictly intentional) but
the course of true love runs anything but smooth. What could get
in the way of such a perfect relationship? A list might begin to
illustrate our Bridget's problems:
- A lithe oriental boy, stark naked, smiling weirdly, and holding
out two wooden balls on a string and a baby rabbit
- Zulu warriors in the rockery
- A polythene bag of white powder
- Gary the builder and the hole in the wall
- Rebecca
- Princess Diana "patron saint of Singleton women"
dies
- Last but not least, "A live bullet."
Rebecca deserves some special mention, because Fielding has another
nice tag for people like her:
Rebecca is not exactly a friend, except that she's always turning
up in 192 with me and Jude and Shaz. But the thing about a Rebecca
is, she's a jellyfisher. You have a conversation with her that
seems all nice and friendly, then you suddenly feel like you've
been stung and you don't know where it came from. You'll be talking
about jeans and she'll say 'Yes, well if you've got cellulite
jodhpurs, you're best in something really well cut like Dolce
& Gabbana,' - she herself having thighs like a baby giraffe
- then smoothly move on to DKNY chinos as is nothing has happened.
The action is fast if not furious and if some of the jokes are
a bit thin by now there's enough humor to keep it going. Fielding
is a good writer. Her first novel Cause Celeb is a solid
piece of work. In that a Bridget Jones-type late-twenty-something
takes off to a relief camp in Africa. It's sharply observed and
funny without overstepping the dangerous line into pity and pathos.
But Fielding would have had to be crazy not to write a sequel to
Bridget Jones's Diary and no matter what she wrote she knew
it was going to disappoint some people. I enjoyed it and laughed
out loud a few times while reading but it left a bitter aftertaste.
After two books the characters all seem to be in exactly the same
personal and mental places as the beginning. Their lives have been
changed by exterior events but rarely do they seem to make choices
themselves. One of her friends does manage to buck everyone else's
opinion by marrying a man generally considered poisonous; but by
the end even this is agreeable and glorious for all concerned.
It's like popcorn, easy to pick up but harder to put down. It'll
be a film, a book and on the front of every magazine. Don't hate
her just because she's light and funny and popular.