The Casual Vacancy
~J K Rowling
‘Kay
climbed the stairs and operated the stiff handle on the door for Robbie. The
room smelled rank. The bath was grey, with successive broken tidemarks around
it, and the toilet had not been flushed. Kay did this before allowing Robbie to
scramble onto the seat. He screwed up his face and strained loudly, indifferent
to her presence. There was a loud splash, and a noisome new note was added to
the already putrid air. He got down and pulled up his already bulging nappy
without wiping; Kay made him come back, and tried to persuade him to do it for
himself, but the action seemed quite foreign to him. In the end she did it for
him. His bottom was sore: crusty, red and irritated. The nappy stank of
ammonia. She tried to remove it, but he yelped, lashed out at her, then pulled
away, scampering back down to the sitting room with his nappy sagging.’
This is a scene from the Fields, a slum
that lies between a small British town Pagford and Yarvil, a city which
provides employment to most people in Pagford. Now, the Pagford Parish Council
wishes to delegate entire responsibility of the Fields to Yarvil, but Barry
Fairbrother, a councilor, fights against the proposal. His main opponent is
Howard Mollison, who believes that people living in the Fields are miserable,
rowdy and drug-addicts by choice.
When Barry dies of aneurysm, the town is
first shocked (oh he was just in his 40s), is saddened by his sudden demise and
then the excitement trickles in as to who will fill the casual vacancy and
decide the fate of the Fields.
Pagford appears to be a picturesque,
idyllic and a boring town, but with each page, JKR has peeled onion layers to
reveal 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,’ as the book’s jacket puts it.
The story revolves around some 20-odd main
characters of different age groups – from teenagers to people in their sixties—and
they are the most memorable part of the story which moves slowly and is hardly remarkable.
The teenagers in the book, though they go
to school, never seem to be worried about homework, classes or the likes.
Instead, they take drugs, smoke, have casual sex, take revenge from parents and
one of them has stalker tendencies. There are many dysfunctional families in
Pagford and as the story develops, one finds how the dysfunctional families
resolve their differences and the functional one disintegrates.
The book has no magic and it certainly
falls short of the standard JKR had created with the Harry Potter series. One
reason is that while she had seven books to give depth to her characters in HP,
in TCV she has given anecdotes in brackets at many places which explain the
reason behind a character’s action or way of thinking. While the anecdotes
succeed in establishing the character, they at times are unnecessary or break
narrative. Secondly, her ending could have been much better. All in all, the
book is good for a one time read and I sincerely hope JKR’s next book is better
than this one. In HP and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry was to be sent to Stonewall
school for higher studies and perhaps his life would have been similar to the
teens in TCV, had magic not saved him.
PS: I’ve read many reviews criticizing JKR
of putting in a rape scene, given that due to her Harry Potter popularity, most
of her readers are bound to be young. Well, I would like to point out that
Dumbledore’s sister, Ariana, was also raped, though it has not been said in so
many words, and then his father murders the muggles responsible for it.
