The Casual Vacancy

I promised to write something about JK Rowling's adult effort, so here we go.  

Put simply, I just didn't get it. This book as the archetypal 'Curate's egg', some sections were beautifully while some (the excruciating sex scenes for example) were sub-sixth form twaddle.

The main thing I didn't get though was the actual setup, the machinery that (supposedly) drove the plot. The 'Parish Council' for example seemed to have more in common with a town or borough authority than the purely parochial parish setups in most villages. Even more confusingly the 'local councillor' would have fitted the role of patrician MP equally well, if not better.

Another thing that grated was the underlying suggestion that poor people live in grinding misery alongside their grinding poverty. In my experience, they have as much fun - possibly more - than the perpetually hassled middle class who are the real miseries. To be fair, Rowling doesn't let them have much fun either.

We'll gloss over large parts of the book being set in a secondary school with teenage protagonists. Some of the younger characters rang true and others really didn't.  Looking at the adults, having a grossly fat shopkeeper worked to an extent, but a deerstalker?  Perhaps how peculiar it would look was exactly what she was after?  I just wanted to know whether the flaps were left up or down, something which I believe the narrative didn't relate.

It's a long, long book and it dragged in many places.  The thin plot strands weren't enough to carry this relatively large coterie of characters really.  And what characters they were, the self-obsessed wife-beating criminal from the print works. The muesli-knitting sandal-wearing terrible single parent from That London.  The drug-addled prostitute from the estate who for some reason has a mother who didn't go 'bad' and is fairly saintly until she is killed by the Indian doctor.  They came across as mere ciphers or loose cliches rather than true 'characters'. Oh, and the daughter of the Indian doctor is an unhappy teenager who self-harms, what were the chances of that?

I have read many, many worse books than this and is a testament to there being something of interest there that I finished it.  On many occasions I have given up a short way into this sort of thing.  That's why it is interesting to look at why this is such a dud (which undoubtedly it is).  A first question is how to categorise the book.  It flits from genre to genre lightly, never really making its mark anywhere.  This is no cosy 'Aga saga', it certainly isn't 'chick-lit'.  The racier content shows that it is definitely aimed at an adult audience and it times it seems to flirt close to being polemic, prose flecked with rage with regard to rural drug treatment centres and poverty.

Parts of the plot held up surprisingly well, particularly the reemergence of the stolen computer at crucial point late on.  Conversely the sections on the various people 'hacking' the Parish Council messageboard felt like they were written by someone that could barely write an email, they clunked enormously.

There also seems to be an attempt to hark back to earlier periods of fiction.  The works of Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell came to mind at moments and the myriad detail of council business give rise to thoughts of the ecclesiastical machinations of Trollope.  The overwritten chapters and overall bulk of the thing reminded me of why sometimes I can't bear some of the weightier tomes from Charles Dickens.

So, all things considered, how could that have been a better read?  A simple way would have been to realise that there is humour in even the bleakest of situations and that it doesn't half help a plot move along.  Alternatively, if you are going to create a cast of grotesques, then forget humour and go for all out scabrous comedy.  About half way through I found myself wishing Tom Sharpe had been let loose on this crowd.  That would have quite a read.

The casual vacancy? The missed opportunity more like.