Well, that's fine by me: I'll be the taste-tester for this book, letting you know if it's safe to read, if your image of J.K. Rowling will be marred and thus the foundation of your childhood ruined. I risked my own childhood to save everyone else's. So, is your childhood in jeopardy?
The truthful answer is, I don't know. This is a book so far removed from Harry Potter that no one would ever think to compare them, had they not been by the same author. The Casual Vacancy takes place in Pagford, a small town in England, just as Barry Fairbrother, a prominent member of the town Council, dies suddenly. This leaves his seat on the Council open, and sparks a vicious war within the town for Barry's seat: for Barry was a crucial supporter of the Fields, a rundown housing area full of drug addicts, prostitutes, criminals, and people living off of welfare. Whoever gets Barry's seat decides what happens to the Fields, a very controversial subject.
Before I begin, I should note that though this is a follow up novel to a hugely successful series, Rowling doesn't need to prove her immense skill as an author. I have no complaints about her writing or her extraordinary ability to draw vividly real, nuanced characters and real places. What I complain about in the novel takes for granted that Rowling is a good author; she even made me care about characters that in a less skillful author's hands I would have hated.
As can be expected, this plot leaves room for lots of social commentary and lots of character development. Yet as each character was introduced, I found myself feeling more and more discouraged. Almost none of the people of Pagford are likeable; all are viciously cruel to each other in one way or another, with little to no redeeming qualities. Actually, it seems that the only good person in the town was Barry Fairbrother, and I found myself wishing he were back so that things weren't quite so miserable. And from the beginning, the book is gratuitously crude, littered with profanities, and shockingly explicit, to the point where I wish I had not read some sections. It's marketed as "for adults" for a reason, and was very nearly a turn off for me. But I kept reading, determined to finish, slogging through pages and pages of cruelty and empty people, all desperate for something outside of their lives. In fact, in a New York Times Interview, J.K. Rowling said she called the novel The Casual Vacancy because she "was dealing with...a bunch of characters who all have these little vacancies in their lives, these emptinesses in their lives, that they're all filling in various ways." This quote, to me, absolutely sums up the novel and the characters, and exactly what is so frustrating about the novel: the characters are all empty.
About 200 pages in, I realized that I did, at least, care for some of them. Some I still couldn't understand, pardon, or excuse, but a few I felt pity for, rooted for, and even cried over. There's Krystal Weedon, a teenage girl from the Fields who's mother is a meth addict; there's Tessa Wall, guidance counselor, mother of Fats Wall and married to Cubby Wall, principle of the high school; there's Kay Bawden, a social worker who seems to actually care about the Weedons and who moved to Pagford for her boyfriend Gavin.
At this point, when people asked me what I thought of the book, I would respond: "I don't know yet. It depends on the ending." Because though the people of Pagford are all a mess, the novel was perhaps meant to be first and foremost a vehicle for social commentary, and whatever statement she left us with in the end would be the most important. It might make all the misery worth it, or show some glimmer of hope. I thought up an acceptable ending in my mind, yet as the amount of pages left grew fewer and fewer, I worried at what could be accomplished.
The ending is unexpected, explosive, and tragic- nothing like what I expected. Surprisingly, I cried- I must have cared about the characters more than I thought. But what is so interesting to me is that Barry Fairbrother's death, which supposedly was supposed to make everyone realize what was important in life and what he stood for, instead results in complete chaos and not much resolution of opinions on the Fields. For all that the last few pages try to offer some glimpses of hope for the future, there is very little resolution for many of the characters of any of their problems.
Essentially, through the ending, Rowling issues a dark warning about the future of the welfare system in Britain, and a lot of social commentary on social apathy without offering many solutions. People are exposed as hypocritical, apathetic, and self-absorbed, and remain that way throughout the novel. There is no transformation or change that occurs in people, which almost means there is no story arc. To me, this lack of a solution or lack of hope at the ending was uncharacteristic. Though their novels may be entirely different, a good author's worldview and moral ideology should remain constant throughout their works. Despite their incomparability of plot and characters, we as readers should be able to point to the same triumph of good over bad, the same idea of the power of love, in both Harry Potter and The Casual Vacancy. But I can't.
And that's why I'm unsatisfied with The Casual Vacancy. Because though it's well written and the characters are well drawn, and though it tackles important social issues, it fails to offer us the same sort of solution or messages that make Harry Potter so important. I think that Rowling is still finding her own opinions on the subject, and it shows in the inconsistency of her writing. But do I completely discourage it? Will your childhood be poisoned? I don't think so. I think it's worth reading to understand the bleakness of life without hope, and then to think afterwards of how that might be changed. Just because Rowling doesn't offer a solution doesn't mean we can't come up with one on our own.
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