The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling
Published: on September 27th 2012 by Little, Brown and Company
Genres: Mystery, Contemporary, Adult Fiction
Pages: 503
Source: Goodreads

A BIG NOVEL ABOUT A SMALL TOWN …

When Barry Fairbrother dies in his early forties, the town of Pagford is left in shock.
Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty façade is 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.
And the empty seat left by Barry on the parish council soon becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen. Who will triumph in an election fraught with passion, duplicity and unexpected revelations?

I am a ridiculously obsessive Harry Potter fan. I have been since I was seven years old, and I’m now twenty-two. So, I am not ashamed to admit that the only reason I purchased this book (on release date) was because it was written by my literary idol J.K. Rowling. How can anything written by a storyteller such as her be disappointing?

However, on my first attempt at reading it, disappointed was what I was. I’m not sure I even made it past the first ten pages. It was a whole two years later that I finally picked the dusty copy off my bookshelf and decided, determinedly, that I was going to read the whole thing, regardless of how disappointing it was. It is an adult novel, after all. Undoubtedly, it is going to be entirely different to the Harry Potter series.

The blurb on the inside cover of the hardback copy I possess, synopsises the novel as ‘a big novel about a small town.’ Barry Fairbrother holds a seat on the Parish Council of the small West Country village of Pagford. However, when he dies, unexpectedly and suddenly, in the car park of his local golf club, the town of Pagford is left in shock and disarray. Barry’s casual vacancy from the Parish Council brings on an election for someone to fill his seat.

On first glance, and even the first one hundred pages, it really does seem to be a dull and mundane book about a small town full of dull and mundane people. The deeper you get into the novel, however, and the deeper into the protagonists lives the author takes you, you realise and remember that yes, J.K. Rowling is indeed the best storyteller our world has ever known.

The novel is executed so understatedly, and so cleverly. It follows the daily goings on of the village residents of Pagford and of the nearby council estate The Fields. There is a sharp contrast, highlighted subtly, through morning chats in bed, telephone calls between mother and son, family arguments, and schoolgirl truanting, between the deeply troubled and addiction-riddled Fields and the snobby, gossipy and conservative Pagford. The blurb states that the book is about the election for the empty seat, but it is about so much more than that. There are times when I had tears rolling down my face, times when I laughed out loud, and times when I literally gasped in horror. JKR has proved herself to be an even more talented, honest and intuitive writer than I ever imagined her to be.

How is it that she understands the injustice and horrors of a family with a mother as a heroin addict? Her portrayal of that dark and misunderstood side of life is scarily realistic and shocking. Krystal Weedon lives a rough and raw life, at sixteen years old, in a dirty, unkempt house with her smack-addicted mother and her baby brother Robbie, whose mother keeps him in sodden nappies, even though he is three years old, and is hungry, moaning constantly, with a red-raw bottom. This brutally realistic portrayal literally made me cry. The horrendous gossiping and judgemental attitudes of the Daily Mail readers of nearby Pagford towards Krystal make you angry at the injustice of a world full of people who are incapable of empathy and are shallowly wrapped up in their own pristine lives.

This book struck a chord with me. It may have taken a while to truly understand and get into, but once you are in it, you feel as if you cannot get out. Rowling has achieved what I imagine she set out to do. Nothing much happens in this book. Everything happens behind closed doors, and every family is not as they seem to outsiders. Andrew Price’s family live in fear of their father, who everyone thinks is such a quiet, normal man, but beats them up just because he is in a bad mood and calls his son ‘Pizza-face’ due to his teenage acne. Sukhvinder Jawanda is a timid, self-harming and shy girl with dyslexia, and a mother who favourites her other two children over her, due to her inability to succeed on an academic basis. She self-harms and is cyber-bullied by Fats, the popular, lanky, and ‘cool’ boy at school, who plasters her Facebook page with definitions of lesbianism and hermaphroditism. Samantha Mollison is a middle-aged wife with two girls, and a husband she is sickened by, as he slowly turns into his arrogant and snobby father. She watches her daughter’s DVD of a teen boy band on repeat and closes her eyes when she has sex with her husband, imagining she is nineteen years old again, and that her husband is the twenty-one year old boy band member. Krystal Weedon is a foul-mouthed bully, but she is also just a sixteen year old girl, with the responsibility of her heroin-addicted mother and her underfed and neglected baby brother on her shoulders. Barry Fairbrother was the only man to ever understand her and give her a chance, and her position on his school rowing team was the making of her. When he dies, she is left with nothing, like before, and her status as the school bicycle is merely a reflection of her harrowed and troubled life and her lack of self-worth.

This book is full of nothing much really, but absolutely everything of massive, political and personal, importance. J.K. Rowling’s first adult novel is a huge political statement, and is honest, subtle, and true, true genius.