This Is Not A Review Of The Casual Vacancy

Don't read The Casual Vacancy, read Barbara Pym or better yet
try to catch Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem for a daring and grown up
approach to these issues...

This is not a review of The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling because I didn't finish the book and I don't review books that I don't finish. I didn't really care much for the stuff I'd read up to the point where the book got levitated Dorothy Parker style across the room but, who knows, the final act might be utterly brilliant erasing everything that has gone before. So with a huge pinch of salt I shall tentatively give you my impressions of what I've read of the novel...
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Actually before I give you my ill informed jottings I suppose I should say first that I was not a fan of Harry Potter. I found the Potter books to be complacent ruling class propaganda for the boarding school elite who somehow still run Britain. Potter came at the end of a long and inglorious line of boarding school stories with all the familiar classist and racist (the Irish kid is always blowing stuff up is my favourite Rowling example) overtones. George Orwell put the knife into these stories in 1940 and its pretty sad that they are still being published without any irony at all in our day. Even without the dubious politics the Potter books weren't really my cup of tea. As I've said many times they're childrens books, books for children, so adults shouldnt be reading them! Anyway, I found the writing pedestrian and unchallenging, the plots annoying and the characters irritating. If you must read books like this then go for Philip Pullman who is Harry Potter for smarter children. He is good. Really good. 
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That said, JK Rowling has put all that behind her and has now written a book for adults called The Casual Vacancy. Its about a vacancy on the rural English parish council of Pagford and an attempt to divorce the town from the nearby housing estate full of oiks. Rowling's heart and politics this time are clearly in the right place (although the descriptions of the housing estate - all used condoms and pregnant chavs - are pretty condescending) but her style is just as dull as ever. The mannered sentences grind away at you line after line, wearing you down with their unfunny jokes, endless adverbs and trying-too-hard similes. The narrative plods in an entirely predictable manner and at no point does the reader fear that they will be taken out of the story by arresting prose or a startling idea. Rowling wants to be taken seriously as a satirist but even the liberal use of the word fuck and modern teen speak can't convince me that she knows what she's talking about. Alas, few billionaires make good social observers...
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The Casual Vacancy is a kind of update of the Anthony Trollope novel, The Warden (as if Trollope needs an update) filtered through the smoggy lens of Rowling's New Labour values and a sense of humour which is very late 80's/early 90's. Rowling has clearly digested a lot of Trollope, Barbara Pym and Douglas Adams and unhappily this book reads like the sort of thing Barbara Pym would have tossed off in a hurried weekend and then put in a drawer because it clearly wasn't going anywhere. I can see what Rowling's targets are, they're the same targets that Jez Butterworth nailed in his brilliant play Jerusalem which Rowling obviously saw and admired. In fact, if I were you I'd get a copy of the play and read it rather than The Casual Vacancy. You'll laugh, you'll cry and you'll think which will definitely not happen if you read the Rowling. But, then again, like I say, maybe it gets better towards the end. If so please let me know in the comments below and I shall stand chastened in my wrent garments before you all... Thanks. 

JK Rowling's Crime Novel

The book world is, apparently, abuzz with the news that JK Rowling's first adult book is going to be a crime novel called The Casual Vacancy. This is how the Guardian broke the news:
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The Casual Vacancy, perhaps the most hotly anticipated book of the year, will be published on 27 September and is set in a small town called Pagford, described by her new publisher Little, Brown as an English idyll "with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey". The story is set in motion by the unexpected demise of Barry Fairweather, a stalwart of the town's parish council who dies in his early forties. Pagford's chocolate-box façade hides a town riven with strife, and the struggle to replace Fairweather "becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen", with "teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils," the publisher said. 
As the election to find his replacement unleashes "passion, duplicity and unexpected revelations", the novel puts Pagford's rivalries under the microscope. There had been speculation that Rowling might be entering the genre of hard-boiled Edinburgh crime fiction after discovering that her editor, David Shelley, counts Dennis Lehane, Val McDermid, Carl Hiaasen and Mark Billingham among his authors.
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I don't know about you but this is not the novel I'm most anticipating this year (that would probably be the new Iain M Banks culture book) but I'm certainly not going to diss this work before it comes out. It does however seem very Barchester Towers to me and I have to say that Trollope's shoes are big shoes to fill. I'm also alarmed that Ms Rowling still thinks names like Fairweather are a good idea. I wonder if the villains will have names like Slimeweasel and Grindstone. Silly give the game away names are fine in childrens books but we expect better in the crime fiction world. I wonder too if the cliche of the English village with sinister goings on underneath wasn't already exploded by Agatha Christie circa 1925. In fact this trope had become so worn out by 1932 (!) that Stella Gibbons was able to parody it in her excellent novel Cold Comfort Farm. It's also the plot of pretty much every Barbara Pym book and the trope even got the Hollywood treatment in Hot Fuzz. Anyway we shall see. I will await her book and give it a fair review. I wont however be tugging my forelock just because Rowling is the most powerful author in the book business.