Fielding gives her latest heroine a hard edge
The world has changed since Helen Fielding introduced Bridget Jones. That’s why the fortysomething novelist features a tougher protagonist in her new novel, “Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination.”
A globe-trotting, terrorist-hunting freelance journalist, Olivia is in many ways the anti-Bridget.
“Olivia has decided to not worry about her figure and weight, to not go through life with the main goal of finding a man,” Fielding says.
“This is deliberate on my part. The world has definitely changed from the time when I wrote ‘Bridget.’ It does not seem appropriate to write two pages on someone’s fear of putting on pounds in the middle of the night.”
A glance at any best-seller list or bookstore display table would suggest that the reading public doesn’t entirely share Fielding’s newfound perspective.
“Chick lit” — a genre focusing on female protagonists obsessed with romance and their appearance, and sometimes their careers — is still one of the most popular types of mainstream fiction. And no one disputes that Fielding invented it.
“When ‘Bridget Jones’ came out, we had never seen anything like it,” says Maureen O’Neal, vice president and editorial director of Ballantine Books. “Then the rest of us (at other publishers) all went looking for something similar.
“It wasn’t just a ‘girlfriend’ novel. Those go all the way back to Mary McCarthy and ‘The Group’ in 1963,” O’Neal says. “And it wasn’t a romance novel, where the heroine and her man are perfect. ‘Bridget Jones’ was funny because it was so very real.”
After the success of “Diary” and its follow-up, “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason” (also being made into a movie starring Rene Zellweger, due this fall), Fielding could have settled into a comfortable routine of cranking out sequels.
But Fielding, if not all the Bridget Joneses out there, had grown up. She wanted to reflect that, as well as other, scarier aspects of the post-Bridget world.
“The sense of something really awful about to happen is part of everyone’s life now,” Fielding says. “Something far worse, even to the most self-obsessed, than weight gain.”
Her first attempt to write Bridget-free fiction floundered.
“Following the second ‘Bridget’ book, I spent two or three years writing a multigenerational saga set in the north of England,” Fielding says. “But I kept getting this idea of a girl as a spy.
“Then I was going on holiday and thought about what sort of book I might like to take along — something with jokes, but also with tension — and I thought, ‘The spy book is what I should be writing.’ “
So she fashioned a comedy-tinged thriller whose core topic is the very unfunny subject of terrorism.
Olivia Joules wants to look nice and finds her heart beating faster when in the embrace of a handsome man. But she ends up in the same cave as Osama bin Laden and faces torture at the hands of a murderous terrorist whose plot she is trying to foil on behalf of the British secret service.
Fielding likes to think Olivia is maybe a little more like her creator than was Bridget.
“When I am writing, it’s my preoccupations and worries and obsessions I’m writing about, if I feel people might share them,” she says. “I like the idea, with Olivia, of an alter ego who triumphs through derring-do. We all wonder how we might respond in those dangerous sorts of situations.”
Despite her efforts to move on as a writer, Fielding still embraces Bridget. She has no choice.
“I’ll always be linked with Bridget. I find myself approached by drunk girls who tell me, ‘I’m Bridget Jones, I’m Bridget Jones,’ ” Fielding says, chuckling.
“I always reply, ‘Bless you, my child, if you’re not Bridget, at least you’re drunk.’ I quite like the whole experience.”