Can Bridget Jones, as a genre, really survive without Mark Darcy? Nothing changes and yet much already has ... Bridget Jones (Renee Zellweger) will be without Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) in the latest book Mad About the Boy. Bridget Jones is back. Yup, the self-obsessed, angst-ridden emotional trainwreck that captured a whole generation of female fans is returning in a third novel. Spoiler alert: Oh, and husband Mark Darcy is dead. But before you reach for the vitriol gun to pepper the comments section with passionate e-abuse for spoiling the big reveal, I should point out it was author Helen Fielding who first let the news out in book extracts and on Facebook. Unsurprisingly, Darcy's demise has gone down rather badly with the legions of Bridget Jones followers, who identify way more closely with their heroine than seems strictly healthy or necessary. I don't think I could bear it. No Mark Darcy???? Will wear a black veil whilst reading this book," female fan Jo-Anne Healy-Trepanier posted on Facebook. Another fan, Janice Wong, joined hundreds of others in proposing a boycott. Well, I guess I won't be reading it. It is supposed to be a chick lit comedy, Helen Fielding, not a Shakespearian/Wagnerian tragedy. Meanwhile, Kelly O'Dwyer's succinct response is typical of many of the other Facebook comments: "Nooooooooooooooooo!!!" Moving swiftly along past the unseemly spectacle of hordes of women of a certain age getting all mushy over Colin Firth, the larger question is whether Bridget can still be funny. While ever her trials and tribulations were limited to obsessing over how many cigarettes she had smoked or the emotional f---wittage of various suitors, we could laugh along with her situation. But now that real tragedy has entered her life in the form of losing her husband at a relatively young age and being left to bring up two young children, the joke is in danger of falling rather flat. In fact, Bridget's predicament now seems more likely to invoke pity rather than chuckles of self-recognition. In the new novel, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, which comes 13 years after the first book, she is recast as the 51-year-old mother of Billy and Mabel, who has landed herself a 30-year-old toyboy. You can fill in the blanks about cellulite and generational misunderstandings. Curiously, despite losing a partner and becoming a mother, Bridget appears not to have grown up in the slightest. She's still the self-doubting ditz that she always was, except with a few overtones of UK TV series Grumpy Old Women thrown in to the mix. Obviously, if it was all happily ever after there wouldn't be much of a story. There needs to be a little grit in the oyster to make it all work. I get that, I really do. But killing off Darcy may well prove to have been a bit too extreme. As Jones writes at one point in her diary: "Five years. Has it really been five years? Oh, Mark. Mark. What am I doing? Why did I start all this? Why didn't I just stay as I was. One suspects many of the rusted-on Darcy/Jones devotees may feel the same way about Fielding's decision to give her heroine another go-round. Poll: Will you read the new Bridget Jones book, Mad About the Boy, now you know Mark Darcy is dead? No, but I'll wait for the movie/DVD Yes, and I can't wait for the movie as well Not at all interested in the Bridget Jones series Total votes: 239. Vote now: Sunday Night's Matthew Ames needs prosthetics