How silly, you might ask, sourly, can a reading public get? Has Western European civilisation come to this - that a comic "diary" to do with a pretty English airhead's search for slimness and a boyfriend (the two being inextricably linked) should be in its fourth month at the top of the UK paperback bestseller list and still selling in its tens of thousands every week? But read it, and the thought of Bridget Jones's Diary (Picador, £5.99 in UK), by Helen Fielding, getting into all those lives will cheer you. And the diary format is the reason. There's something about the innocent honesty of diaries, and the touchingly childlike quality of diaries kept as aids to self-improvement, that disarms the most suspicious third party. Bridget Jones is faux-naif rather than naive, of course, and Helen Fielding is in fact a perfectly smart contemporary writer. But the faux works almost as well for Bridget as it did for Adrian Mole.
Bridget is a thirtysomething with a career - well, a job - and a seriously recidivist problem with plonk (from Norway, or Pakistan, she thinks vaguely about one bottle of wine knocked back in an emergency), peppermint Aeros, Instant Lottery tickets, men, and her mother. Her approach to these enemies of promise in the single woman's life is light on angst and long on laughs. The lightheartedness is signalled within a hundred words of the opening. Bridget's list of New Year's Resolutions kicks off with the remote but neverabandoned ideal of quitting smoking, and drinking no more than fourteen units of alcohol a week. She continues: "Will not waste money on: pasta-makers, ice-cream machines or other culinary devices which will never use; books by unreadable literary authors to put impressively on shelves; exotic underwear, since pointless as have no boyfriend."
This sets the determinedly low-brow scene. Bridget buys what everyone else buys, and her beliefs are based almost entirely on articles in magazine articles that either she or her girlfriends have read. Referring to drinks as "alcohol units" is a typical bit of borrowed earnestness.
The vocabulary of featurearticle philosophy falls poignantly from Bridget's simple lips. "Form functional re lationship with responsible adult," her resolutions conclude, and, "Learn to programme video." She attempts a kind of feminist sternness, while simultaneously trying to trap her men the Cosmo way. I WILL, she says, "develop sense of self as woman of substance, complete WITHOUT boyfriend, as best way to obtain boyfriend . . ." She prepares for a scary literary party at the Ivy with an article about how Tina Brown of the New Yorker deals with parties, "gliding prettily from group to group, saying, `Martin Amis! Nelson Mandela! Richard Gere!' " "Wish to be like Tina Brown," Bridget records, "though not, obviously, so hardworking." One must never go to a party without a clear objective, Bridget learns, "whether it be to `network', thereby adding to your spread of contacts to improve your career: to make friends with someone specific: or simply `clinch' a top deal. Understand where have been going wrong by going to parties armed only with objective of not getting pissed."
Bridget's Home County-ish parents and their genteel friends give Bridget hell about not being married yet. They're pushing a neighbour's son, a Mark Darcy. Bridget is dying for a man, too, if only because if she doesn't get one "I'll end up all alone half eaten by an Alsatian." But she's placing her hopes on her affair - conducted through the modern media of messaging systems and answerphones - with her sexy boss. Unfortunately, this ends in tears when she finds a tall, naked blonde in his roof garden. Even more unfortunately, heartbreak - and indeed its opposite - drives her to comfort-eating and to many, many bottles of plonk. Then she tries to starve. This means she is "caught in a hideous cleft stick as both fatness and dieting are in themselves ageing . . ." Many the night Bridget spends in emergency sessions with her girlfriends and her gay friend Tom. Many the effort she makes. She plans a dinner from a Marco Pierre White cookbook. "This will be the menu," she tells her diary: "Veloute of celery: (v. simple and cheap when have made stock.) Char-grilled Tuna on Veloute of Cherry Tomatoes Coulis with Confit of Garlic and Fondant Potatoes. Confit of Oranges. Grand Marnier Creme Anglaise. Will be marvellous. Will become known as brilliant but apparently effortless cook."
As it transpires, after huge and intricate efforts, Bridget manages to serve: blue soup - blue from some string that got in at the stock-making stage; omelette - cooked by her guests because the tuna disappeared; and marmalade, which is what the confit of oranges turned into. They drink the Grand Marnier straight.
The comedy is slapstick, infantile, and charming. The day-by-day format (the original diary ran in a daily paper) has an intrinsic rhythm. And Bridget herself is a likeable creation - an unpretentious young woman who watches Blind Date and The Generation Game and can't afford the clothes she wants. And who is hearteningly lustful. Her girl friend rings after that night's episode of Colin Firth in Pride and Prejudice, "and we spent twenty minutes growling, "Fawaw, that Mr Darcy! I love the way he talks, sort of as if he can't be bothered. Ding-Dong! Then we had a long discussion about the comparative merits of Mr Darcy and Mark Darcy, both agreeing that Mr Darcy was more attractive because he was ruder but that being imaginary was a disadvantage that could not be overlooked . . ."
Well, in the end, Bridget's Mr Darcy turns out to be like Elizabeth Bennet's - rich, good, able to cope with her impossible family, and smitten. At the next New Year, when our heroine has to admit to a total consumption of "alcohol units 3836 (poor), cigarettes 5277, and calories 11,090,265 (repulsive)", she may not yet be married, but she can include, "Boyfriends 2 (but one for only six days so far), Nice boyfriends 1."