A review of "The Casual Vacancy" by JK Rowling.
Review of “The Casual Vacancy” by JK Rowling.
Spoilers ahead: Do not read further if you do not want spoilers.
If you are expecting Harry Potter, you will be in for a shock, because this new book has nothing to do with the fairy tale universe of the young adult series. I think it is best to approach this book without misconceptions about the author and her previous work. Blank slate.
My first thoughts of the book were that it is less of a story than a social commentary on the life of a little town plagued by gossip, poverty, addiction and greed. Some compared it to Dickens. I would dare to compare it to Emile Zola’s characterization of the working class in “Germinal”. I remember reading Zola in high school, guided then by a teacher, with some unionist agenda, regurgitating the fashionable socialist propaganda of the time, which glorified the working class and bashed the “bourgeois”. I remember thinking that this biased interpretation was wrong and that Zola was really exposing the ‘sins’ of both classes. I did not challenge my teacher then, mostly out of cowardice, and it took many years, as well as the exposure to the other extreme of the political agenda here in the USA to understand what this teacher really meant at the time. I could not understand problems of the working class, because I had not been exposed to the hardship of poverty, coming from a fairly traditional upper middle class French family. We did not have a lot of money, but we were not poor, certainly not in the extremes described in the book. And I refused to apologize for the little money we had and the effort my family made to earn it. Because I was refusing socialism as the accepted norm in a society where the mere mention of money was automatically placing you in the very hated group of selfish capitalists and anti-intellectuals, and, where for a few years infatuation with the Soviet model prompted Government workers to float the red flag on the front of official post offices instead of the French flag, I completely rejected the whole idea of social contribution. I felt I was unfairly judged, because I did not belong to the working class, but was the daughter of self-employed little shop owners, who according to the rhetoric of the time were maybe a lot worse than the richest capitalists. This lack of acceptance and social extremism, which was then played in the media, blinded me to the realities of poverty. I was uneducated socially. I had not lived it. I had not experienced it “in the flesh” so to speak. Mostly, I lacked compassion. And, because I felt isolated in that society, I rejected it.
When I read the “Casual Vacancy”, I had a Zola flashback. Rowling-does-Zola is about a non-complacent description of poverty, greed, small minds trapped in their middle class prejudices, with a brutal honesty turned to sarcasm and cynicism. I predict that as Zola’s, Rowling’s novel may become a snapshot of the social inequalities and the hypocrisy of our time and, as such, may become a classic. Nobody is spared in “The Casual Vacancy”. When Barry Fairbrother dies, and his seat on the council becomes vacant, gossip, covetousness, envy and political manipulations invade the otherwise-dull lives of each potential successors and their families. The meaningless and vile motives of each one of the adult characters, following their own greedy narrow-minded agendas, drive a sequence of events, leading to the unavoidable dramatic conclusion: hurting at the end the purest and most innocent victim of this book. The contentious piece is “The Fields”, a section of town, ghetto for the poorest population, littered with garbage, used condoms, graffiti, and harboring drug addicts and their dealers, unemployed and beyond-damaged individuals without hope. Children from The Fields attend school with their richer counterparts, creating confrontations and misunderstandings. Few leave The Fields to succeed and Fairbrother was one of those, which did not prevent him to lose some of his innocence later on as a politician, but he never forgot his origins and continued to support social contributions to that part of town as well as the drug rehabilitation clinic he sponsored. Fairbrother may very well be the less immoral adult of the book, except he is dead.
It is interesting that Rowling mostly directs her anger at the adult characters, who all have lost their innocence, their spontaneity and who are corrupted in their deepest moral cores. Their corruption is not necessarily conscious, but driven by their own greediness and petty inspirations. They have lost their morality, because they are caught in political popularity contest, a power-hungry race for control. That control may be physical, moral, ethical or simply control of their self-destructive impulses. From the violent man, buying stolen equipment and abusing his wife and son, the other father unable to stop inappropriate impulses and his wife covering for him, a tiger mother indifferent to the dyslexic daughter not meeting her expectations, stories of adultery, a social worker deluded in her love and powerless in face of the bureaucratic social services, rejection and complete misunderstanding of their children, sex without love, rape and drug abuse, the main psychological drive of these characters is control (or lack thereof) and its consequences. When an angry teenager impersonates the now-dead Fairbrother and post a vengeful blog in his name, revealing one seat contender deepest darkest secret, an implacable Rube Goldberg machine is set in motion, which will ultimately lead to the demise of the weakest characters of the book. Rowling does not redeem her characters. She crushes them with violence equal to their sins. The innocents are not spared; they bear the consequences of the sins of their elders. Just like in real life, it is far from being fair, and often the ones to suffer are not the perpetrators but the children, victims of the immoral choices, lack of control and greed of their elders.
This constitutes the moral tale of this book: we all are responsible. Our society, blind to poverty, treating with contempt the most vulnerable individuals of a population, is doomed to collapse and cause harm to the children, hereby setting in perpetual motion the vicious circle of abuse, misery, bigotry, lack of education, into self-destruction. Even acts of charity -one woman volunteers in the local hospital- are dissected for their real vain motivations: not to really help others, but to gain a psychological self-absorption profit and access to the latest gossip. Rowling is relentless in describing the hidden motivations in what would appear to be ‘good actions’ on the outside, but are motivated by much less pure feelings. The richest exert control over the poorest, while condemning their transgressions in moral judgments. Meanwhile, their own transgressions are well hidden under the veil of propriety. The poorest are not without fault either and their poverty does not bring them to the level of sanctity (far from it); on the contrary, their lives are described without pity. They are unable to get themselves out of their hole, are uneducated and abusive. It is clear that without constant and consistent help from the society, they will never get out of their situation and even then, they are so damaged that relapse may happen at any time and with any trigger. This highlights the difficulty of social work, which may seem futile in face of such misery and may appear worthless, a waste of money and effort to help individuals without moral value or work ethics. Rowling is ruthless with the system, and of course her implied solution, would be that this effort has to be born from the entire community without exception, with opportunities given at the earliest age and education of the children as well as the parents. This would imply selflessness and altruism, which none of her adult characters is capable of feeling. I did not understand it in my teenage years either, until I was confronted with poverty and the absence of social help from society in the USA. As I was not sheltered anymore in my comfortable life and was exposed to poverty, which I observed in some students and around me, I started to understand what the absence of social protection really meant and that, when individuals would slip so low into their addiction, delusion and lack of hope, not much could be done. Prevention remains the key and of course it takes longer to break the circle of hopelessness.
As JK Rowling describes in a recent interview, the main theme of the book is the absence of love. I would say, it is certainly the absence of compassion. When I attended the “Mind and Life” conference a few years ago in Washington DC, the Dalai Lama discussed something I will never forget. He described that there are two kinds of compassion: one we naturally experience when we see harm happening to an individual (or even an animal) and one we acquire through life experiences and which has to be cultivated. He also said that when individuals were exposed to very traumatic, harmful, painful experiences from an early age on, they may toughen and lose that natural compassion, and they certainly do not learn to cultivate the one we acquire through life. Of course without this, they perpetuate the circle of violence and harm. Most of us do forget to cultivate compassion on a daily basis, because we are so involved in our little life problems, just like I was when I was in high school and even sometime later on. Like the individuals in the book, we create our own suffering and propagate it to others. Therefore, we never stop the circle, and it goes around and comes back. In order to see reality the way it is, we have to shed our preconceptions first and embrace the others without moral judgments, the good and the bad alike. Tough to do in a society where we are brainwashed to judge and compete on a daily basis. Buddhists call this vicious circle Karma and certainly there is plenty of bad Karma in JK Rowling’s book. The teenagers seem to be the only ones with enough innocence and morality left, which has not yet been destroyed by adulthood. Maybe they just have not accumulated enough bad karma yet. The ultimate hero of the book is the young Indian teenager, bullied and self-harming, but morally intact, whose ultimate act of courage shows us that there is still hope, when we are able to feel and express compassion.
Spoilers ahead: Do not read further if you do not want spoilers.
If you are expecting Harry Potter, you will be in for a shock, because this new book has nothing to do with the fairy tale universe of the young adult series. I think it is best to approach this book without misconceptions about the author and her previous work. Blank slate.
My first thoughts of the book were that it is less of a story than a social commentary on the life of a little town plagued by gossip, poverty, addiction and greed. Some compared it to Dickens. I would dare to compare it to Emile Zola’s characterization of the working class in “Germinal”. I remember reading Zola in high school, guided then by a teacher, with some unionist agenda, regurgitating the fashionable socialist propaganda of the time, which glorified the working class and bashed the “bourgeois”. I remember thinking that this biased interpretation was wrong and that Zola was really exposing the ‘sins’ of both classes. I did not challenge my teacher then, mostly out of cowardice, and it took many years, as well as the exposure to the other extreme of the political agenda here in the USA to understand what this teacher really meant at the time. I could not understand problems of the working class, because I had not been exposed to the hardship of poverty, coming from a fairly traditional upper middle class French family. We did not have a lot of money, but we were not poor, certainly not in the extremes described in the book. And I refused to apologize for the little money we had and the effort my family made to earn it. Because I was refusing socialism as the accepted norm in a society where the mere mention of money was automatically placing you in the very hated group of selfish capitalists and anti-intellectuals, and, where for a few years infatuation with the Soviet model prompted Government workers to float the red flag on the front of official post offices instead of the French flag, I completely rejected the whole idea of social contribution. I felt I was unfairly judged, because I did not belong to the working class, but was the daughter of self-employed little shop owners, who according to the rhetoric of the time were maybe a lot worse than the richest capitalists. This lack of acceptance and social extremism, which was then played in the media, blinded me to the realities of poverty. I was uneducated socially. I had not lived it. I had not experienced it “in the flesh” so to speak. Mostly, I lacked compassion. And, because I felt isolated in that society, I rejected it.
When I read the “Casual Vacancy”, I had a Zola flashback. Rowling-does-Zola is about a non-complacent description of poverty, greed, small minds trapped in their middle class prejudices, with a brutal honesty turned to sarcasm and cynicism. I predict that as Zola’s, Rowling’s novel may become a snapshot of the social inequalities and the hypocrisy of our time and, as such, may become a classic. Nobody is spared in “The Casual Vacancy”. When Barry Fairbrother dies, and his seat on the council becomes vacant, gossip, covetousness, envy and political manipulations invade the otherwise-dull lives of each potential successors and their families. The meaningless and vile motives of each one of the adult characters, following their own greedy narrow-minded agendas, drive a sequence of events, leading to the unavoidable dramatic conclusion: hurting at the end the purest and most innocent victim of this book. The contentious piece is “The Fields”, a section of town, ghetto for the poorest population, littered with garbage, used condoms, graffiti, and harboring drug addicts and their dealers, unemployed and beyond-damaged individuals without hope. Children from The Fields attend school with their richer counterparts, creating confrontations and misunderstandings. Few leave The Fields to succeed and Fairbrother was one of those, which did not prevent him to lose some of his innocence later on as a politician, but he never forgot his origins and continued to support social contributions to that part of town as well as the drug rehabilitation clinic he sponsored. Fairbrother may very well be the less immoral adult of the book, except he is dead.
It is interesting that Rowling mostly directs her anger at the adult characters, who all have lost their innocence, their spontaneity and who are corrupted in their deepest moral cores. Their corruption is not necessarily conscious, but driven by their own greediness and petty inspirations. They have lost their morality, because they are caught in political popularity contest, a power-hungry race for control. That control may be physical, moral, ethical or simply control of their self-destructive impulses. From the violent man, buying stolen equipment and abusing his wife and son, the other father unable to stop inappropriate impulses and his wife covering for him, a tiger mother indifferent to the dyslexic daughter not meeting her expectations, stories of adultery, a social worker deluded in her love and powerless in face of the bureaucratic social services, rejection and complete misunderstanding of their children, sex without love, rape and drug abuse, the main psychological drive of these characters is control (or lack thereof) and its consequences. When an angry teenager impersonates the now-dead Fairbrother and post a vengeful blog in his name, revealing one seat contender deepest darkest secret, an implacable Rube Goldberg machine is set in motion, which will ultimately lead to the demise of the weakest characters of the book. Rowling does not redeem her characters. She crushes them with violence equal to their sins. The innocents are not spared; they bear the consequences of the sins of their elders. Just like in real life, it is far from being fair, and often the ones to suffer are not the perpetrators but the children, victims of the immoral choices, lack of control and greed of their elders.
This constitutes the moral tale of this book: we all are responsible. Our society, blind to poverty, treating with contempt the most vulnerable individuals of a population, is doomed to collapse and cause harm to the children, hereby setting in perpetual motion the vicious circle of abuse, misery, bigotry, lack of education, into self-destruction. Even acts of charity -one woman volunteers in the local hospital- are dissected for their real vain motivations: not to really help others, but to gain a psychological self-absorption profit and access to the latest gossip. Rowling is relentless in describing the hidden motivations in what would appear to be ‘good actions’ on the outside, but are motivated by much less pure feelings. The richest exert control over the poorest, while condemning their transgressions in moral judgments. Meanwhile, their own transgressions are well hidden under the veil of propriety. The poorest are not without fault either and their poverty does not bring them to the level of sanctity (far from it); on the contrary, their lives are described without pity. They are unable to get themselves out of their hole, are uneducated and abusive. It is clear that without constant and consistent help from the society, they will never get out of their situation and even then, they are so damaged that relapse may happen at any time and with any trigger. This highlights the difficulty of social work, which may seem futile in face of such misery and may appear worthless, a waste of money and effort to help individuals without moral value or work ethics. Rowling is ruthless with the system, and of course her implied solution, would be that this effort has to be born from the entire community without exception, with opportunities given at the earliest age and education of the children as well as the parents. This would imply selflessness and altruism, which none of her adult characters is capable of feeling. I did not understand it in my teenage years either, until I was confronted with poverty and the absence of social help from society in the USA. As I was not sheltered anymore in my comfortable life and was exposed to poverty, which I observed in some students and around me, I started to understand what the absence of social protection really meant and that, when individuals would slip so low into their addiction, delusion and lack of hope, not much could be done. Prevention remains the key and of course it takes longer to break the circle of hopelessness.
As JK Rowling describes in a recent interview, the main theme of the book is the absence of love. I would say, it is certainly the absence of compassion. When I attended the “Mind and Life” conference a few years ago in Washington DC, the Dalai Lama discussed something I will never forget. He described that there are two kinds of compassion: one we naturally experience when we see harm happening to an individual (or even an animal) and one we acquire through life experiences and which has to be cultivated. He also said that when individuals were exposed to very traumatic, harmful, painful experiences from an early age on, they may toughen and lose that natural compassion, and they certainly do not learn to cultivate the one we acquire through life. Of course without this, they perpetuate the circle of violence and harm. Most of us do forget to cultivate compassion on a daily basis, because we are so involved in our little life problems, just like I was when I was in high school and even sometime later on. Like the individuals in the book, we create our own suffering and propagate it to others. Therefore, we never stop the circle, and it goes around and comes back. In order to see reality the way it is, we have to shed our preconceptions first and embrace the others without moral judgments, the good and the bad alike. Tough to do in a society where we are brainwashed to judge and compete on a daily basis. Buddhists call this vicious circle Karma and certainly there is plenty of bad Karma in JK Rowling’s book. The teenagers seem to be the only ones with enough innocence and morality left, which has not yet been destroyed by adulthood. Maybe they just have not accumulated enough bad karma yet. The ultimate hero of the book is the young Indian teenager, bullied and self-harming, but morally intact, whose ultimate act of courage shows us that there is still hope, when we are able to feel and express compassion.