The Casual Vacancy

Summary (from the publisher): When Barry Fairbrother dies in his early forties, the town of Pagford is left in shock. Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty façade is a town at war. Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils...Pagford is not what it first seems. And the empty seat left by Barry on the parish council soon becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen. Who will triumph in an election fraught with passion, duplicity, and unexpected revelations?

A big novel about a small town, The Casual Vacancy is J.K. Rowling's first novel for adults. Blackly comic, thought-provoking, and constantly surprising, it is the work of a storyteller like no other.

Review: In some ways, it's a shame that Rowling didn't write this novel under a pseudonym because it was inevitable that the next book to be written following the Harry Potter series would receive much scrutiny and negative comparison as a result of the series' larger than life status.  The Casual Vacancy does not pretend to be like Harry Potter in any way. It is a distinctly adult novel, despite containing the perspective of several teenagers. And it is strictly non-fantasy - there is no magic in the town of Pagford. I've read that others argue that Pagford, a small and rather average English town, is sort of like the world Harry Potter left behind; the land of his very disagreeable aunt and uncle. I think this is true, and is really the only visible connection or similarity between the plots of Rowling's two storylines.

This novel is about the town of Pagford, which is reeling after the sudden and unexpected death of Barry Fairbrother, wife of Mary, father of four, advocate for the town's poor and unruly youth, and perhaps most critically, member of Pagford's parish council. Barry's death sets of a chain of events and a heated campaign and election to fill his empty seat that was vacated by his death - known as a "casual vacancy."

Pagford itself is the main character of this novel in a way, since it is the common element that the dozens of characters within this novel share. Living in a small town means everyone operates in a very small orbit and their lives inevitably overlap - council member Dr. Parminder Jawanda serves as fellow council member Howard Mollison's general practitioner and in turn, she shops at Howard's deli. Howard's wife Shirley volunteers at the local hospital, where she befriends Ruth Price, whose husband Simon runs for council. And Ruth's son Andrew goes to school with Dr. Jawanda's daughter Sukhvinder, the Fairbrother children, and Fats Wall. Fats Wall's father Cubby works at the school, and Cubby is also running for Barry Fairbrother's council seat. In other words, there's more than one connection between each character and another. This also made it difficult to follow the novel at first; there's several dozen characters and the third person narrative slips in and out of the perspective of almost a dozen of them.

Rowling does an excellent job of creating a whole host of characters that make up Pagford. Each character's perspective is distinctive and despite the numerous characters, Rowling is successful in delineating between all of them for the reader. However, despite her adroit ability to set the scene, the action moved slowly at the halfway point of the novel for me. The arc of the plot is the death of a council member to the successful election of a new member to fill the slot and all the happenings during that period. It takes five hundred pages to accomplish this.

I was surprised at the great emphasis on the theme of social class in this novel. The Weedon family is held up as an example throughout the book as a family living in poverty and drug abuse, and of course, different characters have different opinions about the family. Some pity them and want to help; others view them as a lost cause. Another theme of the novel is children living in abuse and/or neglect. This obviously applies to Krystal and Robbie Weedon who live in filth with a mother who is constantly high and are in and out of foster homes. It also applies to Andrew Price, whose father is abusive, and also to Sukhvinder, whose parents are so oblivious to her depression and the fact that she's being bullied that she begins to cut herself in the privacy of her bedroom.

Just as in Harry Potter, Rowling is excellent in creating an imagined world with a very diverse and expansive cast of characters. Additionally, her writing struck me at times with both its beauty and also a dark sense of humor; "Krystal's slow passage up the school had resembled the passage of a goat through the body of a boa constrictor, being highly visible and uncomfortable for both parties concerned" (58). And later, "The sky was a cold iron-gray, like the underside of a shield. A sharp breeze lifted the hems of skirts and rattled the leaves on the immature trees; a spiteful, chill wind that sought out your weakest places, the nape of your neck and your knees, and which denied you the comfort of dreaming, of retreating a little from reality. Even after she had closed the car door on it, Tessa felt ruffled and put out, as she would have been by somebody crashing into her without apology" (84).

At heart, this novel is about flawed individuals and the mistakes they make, and occasionally the right choices they make. Although I felt the novel dragged a bit, I was deeply saddened by the ending, which is clearly the author's way of urging her readers to be more like Barry Fairbrother, who gave those who needed the most the second chance they needed.

Stars: 4