How could J. K. Rowling’s first ‘book for adults’ ever be received as momentously as the world of Harry Potter; the world we joined the author in dwelling for so many glorious childhood years? It’s not as though The Casual Vacancy is a petulant little sister tugging on the hems of Harry’s robes, it’s more like a cocky, overgrown toddler slamming into his legs.
But this is the book Rowling ‘needed to write’, and that says it all. Despite a rather captivating plot and some charmingly amusing moments, Rowling’s sense of her own freedom drips from the page. Yet, unfortunately, it drips in a way that verges uneasily on desperation. However much she loved Potter, loved the pay-checks rolling into Gringotts, Rowling became so bound by the constraints of children’s literature that the end signified a kind of release from its crushing clutch. Of course, she rocketed as far from Hogwarts as was literally possible.
Lurking in the shadows behind The Casual Vacancy’s rather dull blurb is a dark and quite shocking read, loaded like a syringe full of expletives, sex and social workers. Characters called Fats and Krystal plague the page and swap butter-beer for much harder substances entirely.
Attempted is a modern version of the nineteenth-century novel that focuses entirely on a little town and the people that abide there. But here, in modernity, appearances are deceptive, and Rowling’s boring little town of ‘idyll’ masks a town at war with a pretty façade. What Rowling had to do was kill someone off in the first few pages; set the tone, and allow for a stranger to enter their still-warm seat on the parish council. Goodbye Barry Fairbrother; shot right through the heart by Rowling in his early forties.
What emerges is, yes, a selfish fight for control in the community but also a battling human spirit, a concern for others which Rowling spotlights nicely in the graphic nature of the exchange between two very opposing sides of one small bank of humanity.
Clunky in parts, and uncomfortable in others, it is difficult not to consider the novel an anti-climax. But it would have been impossible not to. This is the result of literary crazes like Potter: however good, they become difficult to match in either reputation or delivery. Yet Rowling came out all guns blazing, and she certainly has not lost the magic of a unique imagination. Hopefully Rowling’s next attempt will be void of this middle-child syndrome.
The Casual Vacancy is available now from Little Brown.
words. Lottie Brown