Book Review: The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling

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It was a strange moment when I found myself once again holding an unread J.K. Rowling book. There was a certain sweet nostalgia in the unfamiliarity, made all the sweeter by the fact that it had been questionable if I’d find myself in a similar situation ever again. And yet, there it was, grinning at me like a vintage movie poster. Or perhaps I was the one that was grinning, but I didn’t stay that way for long. I spent two solid days working my way through the 500 page novel that broke my heart over and over again.

The idyllic English country town of Pagford is the setting of The Casual Vacancy, and also its central character. The town is bordered by an unsavory council estate called the Fields. The residents of Pagford proper hold the Fields in contempt for their less than respectable ways. Yet the secrets they harbor behind their quaint doors are every bit as unsavory as what goes on in the Fields. At the opening of the book, Barry Fairbrother—town councilor, town activist, rowing coach, friend to all, and genuinely good man—dies of a burst aneurism in his brain.
Barry was a linchpin of the community both politically and socially, and the removal of that pin opens the floodgates. The town has to elect someone to fill Barry’s place on the town council, and as the race comes to a head the town gossip machine lurches into overdrive, crushing many on his war path. It would seem that no one is quite safe in Pagford and that life is decidedly less than perfect. Readers are welcomed to Pagford just as the façade is beginning to crumble.

The citizens of Pagford have a lot of shortcoming and a lot of secrets. J.K. Rowling did not spare any expense in exploring them. The book as a whole runs the gamut for current social issues: she touches upon poverty, drug addiction, child and sexual abuse, marital problems and infidelity, cyber-bullying, prejudice, self mutilation, mental health issues, teenage love and sexual behavior, and the battle between parents and their teenagers. Because the book attempts to encompass so much, there was a high potential for it to get bogged down by its own weight or to become preachy. This never happened. The book employs a third person narrator who speaks through the eyes of at least 10 characters in a cast of 20 plus. Rowling is adept at maintaining large casts, but one of the true successes of the book is the way in which she weaves together the tales of her very distinct, diverse, and authentic characters into a single cohesive narrative.

 

Yet the real success of the book is that she is able to tell a deeply human story. This book is dark; arguably even more so than her previous works, and decidedly lacking the comedic breaks that I’ve always loved of her.  But what she has created is a place where the problems we have all seen, or known, or had to some degree, are forced into a Petri dish of verdant countryside and left to ferment and fester. Rowling again shows her understanding of the complexities of human nature and the way that we handle crisis. Her characters were both likeable and detestable and some switched camps several times. But all had their vulnerabilities, which we were allowed to see and get a genuine understanding for why the characters acted the way that they did. And that’s what made the book such a good read.  The Casual Vacancy is about a place, but a place is nothing without its people. And in Pagford, its people and their sorry lives wrenched at my heart and kept me turning the page.

By Meaghan O’Brien