Book Review: The Casual Vacancy

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.