Remember Bridget Jones? She of the diary, of the obsessing about weight and wine and clothes and commitment, she who - in a hilarious and sparkling finale which somehow managed to involve both her parents as well as all her friends - made off with the physically and financially irresistible Mr Darcy. Nobody could be blamed for wanting more of Bridget Jones; for if the character herself was no more than an amalgam of the crazed pointlessness which seems to have gripped the developed world, the voice - that stream of vitriolic observation cleverly disguised as ditziness - was a comic triumph.
A sequel must have seemed, as Jones herself would put it, a V. Good Thing. Alas, now that we have more of her, even the most avid Jones junkie would be forgiven for wondering if a little of Bridget didn't, after all, go quite a long way.
The problem begins on page one, with the resumption of that highly idiosyncratic diary form. "9 st 3", it reads. "(Total fat groove), boyfriends I (hurrah!). shags 3 (hurrah!) This is more of the same with a vengeance, and as the book goes on, it becomes apparent that more of the same is to be raised to a merciless level: same characters, same attitudes, same behaviour, same vocabulary. The reader who waits, heart slowly sinking, for the introduction of something fresh into the mix, waits in vain. The female friends who were so amusing last time out are still getting pissed as newts and rabbiting on about Singletons and Smug Marrieds (guess which category applies).
The eccentric parents have been reduced to a tediously garrulous mother who goes on holiday to Kenya and brings back a Big Black Man the way anyone else would bring back a Masai wall-hanging, and a doddery old fool of a father whose descent into a haze of alcoholic despair is milked remorselessly for its comic value - which is, let's face it, nil. The amiable gay friend has - pointedly and very, very wisely - taken himself off to California.
There are, despite everything - despite, for example, the obligatory Di-is-dead oh-my-God chapter which I, for one, could have lived without - some blindingly funny moments, mostly to do with mad hair and scary undergarments. Call me shallow, but I loved the scene in which she goes to Rome to interview Cohn Firth about his role in the film Fever Pitch, and, while he struggles to express the emotional relevance of Nick Hornby to everyday life, insists on quizzing him in- stead about the filming of the scene in the telly Pride and Prejudice in which he emerged, fully clothed and dripping and jaw-droppingly gorgeous, from a lake.
But there are too few of those moments, and too many worrying signs of an idea being stretched to breaking point and beyond, to make Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason a truly successful comic novel. I don't want to give too much away, but Bridget's performance in Thailand in the latter part of the book is just too cool to be credible; the running joke about married Magda and her potty toddler ("Has he done it in the bed? A wee or a poo? A WEE OR A P00?") is mind-numbingly crass; and if the episode which involves the schizophrenic son of a Filipino maid is supposed to be funny, then funny has, cif late, turned very, very peculiar.
Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times journalist
