The Casual Vacancy
J K Rowling has always had a a genius for names, but when I began reading this one and found it full of a multitude of perfectly ordinary modern English names - and by that I mean Indian included - I was beginning to despair of keeping everyone straight in my mind.
They rhyme, they start with the same letter, they alliterate, they turn out to be nicknames as well as real ones so there's more to keep track of, and they soon develop patterns and interlockings that make it important to keep everything clear.
Arrrgh! Where are all those distinctive, meaty Hogwarts names? Nobody confuses Hagrid with Dumbledore with Snape.
Instead we have Shirley and Samantha and Sukhvinder, Stuart and Simon, twins Libby and Lexie, Miles Mollison, son of Shirley, married to Samantha. Sukhvinder is nicknamed Jolly, sister to Jazzy (Jaswant) Jawanda.
And all these characters are related. They are married or parents or partners or lovers or rivals or friends. There's school, the town council, the rowing team (which slides somehow from the past to the future), the cafe, each a setting for a different set of relationships. Not to mention the tangled web of the public housing estate where casual relationships, half-siblings and foster parents are the norm, and a handsome stranger might turn out to be your brother.
The poor bloody reader has their work cut out to follow the plot. Or plots, rather, because just like the Harry Potter stories, there's a whole bunch of things going on and a small throwaway detail on one page turns out to be vital several chapters later.
We're talking small town England here. Everybody knows everyone else's business, and if they don't, some vindictive bastard (and I use the term advisedly) will put it up on the council's website noticeboard in the most distressing manner. After every crisis, the village phone lines run hot as the gossips spread the juice, and if you hear an engaged signal when you are dishing the dirt, it means someone else has gotten in first.
And there's plenty of dirt to rake over. The whole community is made up of flawed characters, hiding some dreadful secret, doing something they shouldn't, brooding over long-gone sins and planning fresh follies.
A lesser writer would have submerged the reader, drowning them in detail, hashing the story until it made no sense at all. But somehow Rowling keeps everything distinct, giving each and every character some handle for the reader to hang onto as they plunge into the thorns of the thicket of council politics, schoolyard relationships, inter/intra/extramarital affairs and generation gapes that divide families.
There's only one straightforward character in the whole book, and he dies on page three, so there!
There are more deaths in the final few pages, where paths cross in a hectic few minutes and if the reader hasn't worked out exactly who is who by now, they won't have a chance of understanding what happens. And why.
It's a bit of a struggle in the first chapters, but the pace picks up, and I finished the last third of the book at a run, unwilling to leave the narrative for more than the necessary, so keen I was to see what happened next and how it finished up.
Rather like the Harry Potter books, I guess.
Every reviewer will have said it by now. This is not another in the same vein. Not a children's book, and probably not a teenager's book, despite half the characters being high school students. There is sex and drugs and violence aplenty, but thankfully we are spared the details. Mostly.
There is no charm or magic about the village, the school, the occupants. Every family is somehow dysfunctional. This is Muggledom at its most muddled, and where oh where is Professor Dumbledore to wave his wand over the chaos? The authority figures in this book are unappealing, their powers drawn from gossip and violence, threats and secrets.
In the end, we have to rely on the author to keep things in order, and she is playing her own games with us, hiding secrets, building the tension, snatching a longed-for kiss away and substituting some embarrassing and inappropriate fumble.
Not fitting, but it fits in a more or less satisfying way. Just as the underlying secret of the Hogwarts adventure turned out to be a mother's love, here in Pagford it is a different kind of love that triumphs in the end. Maternal bonds are slender and flawed here, but what really counts are the feelings of strangers for each other. A social worker taking up an unexpected case. A councillor bonding a set of unlikely team mates into a winning combination. A doctor seeing through the boundaries of class and stigma. There is a message here for the modern English, and it is that everyone should try to get along. Try to work together. Try to love one another for what they are, not hate them for what they are not.
I am personally indebted to J K Rowling. My son changed from a child who was read to into a standalone booklover because he couldn't wait for his mother to read the next chapter. There's a story I love to tell about my daughter, babysitting of an evening, telling the mother that she had to rush home to read more Harry Potter. "Aren't you a bit old for Harry Potter?" asked the mother. "I don't think so," my daughter replied. "I have to fight both my parents for reading time."
After a while we just bought two copies of each fresh book on the day of publication and did our best.
I'm looking forward to Rowling's next book, actually. She's still finding her feet as a writer of serious adult fiction after such a massive effort of wizards and giants and goblins and magic, but she has the gift of storytelling, and there's nothing going to stop her. She is over the hump of the successful author, when they know that any old rubbish with their name on the dustjacket will still be a bestseller. The Casual Vacancy is tightly written, well-crafted, beautifully paced, and a joy to read; even if the subject matter is dismal, the story draws the reader along nicely.
This will be a movie in a year's time, no doubt about that, and every twenty-something who grew up with Harry Potter will be buying cinema tickets to see it. Along with their parents.
They rhyme, they start with the same letter, they alliterate, they turn out to be nicknames as well as real ones so there's more to keep track of, and they soon develop patterns and interlockings that make it important to keep everything clear.
Arrrgh! Where are all those distinctive, meaty Hogwarts names? Nobody confuses Hagrid with Dumbledore with Snape.
Instead we have Shirley and Samantha and Sukhvinder, Stuart and Simon, twins Libby and Lexie, Miles Mollison, son of Shirley, married to Samantha. Sukhvinder is nicknamed Jolly, sister to Jazzy (Jaswant) Jawanda.
And all these characters are related. They are married or parents or partners or lovers or rivals or friends. There's school, the town council, the rowing team (which slides somehow from the past to the future), the cafe, each a setting for a different set of relationships. Not to mention the tangled web of the public housing estate where casual relationships, half-siblings and foster parents are the norm, and a handsome stranger might turn out to be your brother.
The poor bloody reader has their work cut out to follow the plot. Or plots, rather, because just like the Harry Potter stories, there's a whole bunch of things going on and a small throwaway detail on one page turns out to be vital several chapters later.
We're talking small town England here. Everybody knows everyone else's business, and if they don't, some vindictive bastard (and I use the term advisedly) will put it up on the council's website noticeboard in the most distressing manner. After every crisis, the village phone lines run hot as the gossips spread the juice, and if you hear an engaged signal when you are dishing the dirt, it means someone else has gotten in first.
And there's plenty of dirt to rake over. The whole community is made up of flawed characters, hiding some dreadful secret, doing something they shouldn't, brooding over long-gone sins and planning fresh follies.
A lesser writer would have submerged the reader, drowning them in detail, hashing the story until it made no sense at all. But somehow Rowling keeps everything distinct, giving each and every character some handle for the reader to hang onto as they plunge into the thorns of the thicket of council politics, schoolyard relationships, inter/intra/extramarital affairs and generation gapes that divide families.
There's only one straightforward character in the whole book, and he dies on page three, so there!
There are more deaths in the final few pages, where paths cross in a hectic few minutes and if the reader hasn't worked out exactly who is who by now, they won't have a chance of understanding what happens. And why.
It's a bit of a struggle in the first chapters, but the pace picks up, and I finished the last third of the book at a run, unwilling to leave the narrative for more than the necessary, so keen I was to see what happened next and how it finished up.
Rather like the Harry Potter books, I guess.
Every reviewer will have said it by now. This is not another in the same vein. Not a children's book, and probably not a teenager's book, despite half the characters being high school students. There is sex and drugs and violence aplenty, but thankfully we are spared the details. Mostly.
There is no charm or magic about the village, the school, the occupants. Every family is somehow dysfunctional. This is Muggledom at its most muddled, and where oh where is Professor Dumbledore to wave his wand over the chaos? The authority figures in this book are unappealing, their powers drawn from gossip and violence, threats and secrets.
In the end, we have to rely on the author to keep things in order, and she is playing her own games with us, hiding secrets, building the tension, snatching a longed-for kiss away and substituting some embarrassing and inappropriate fumble.
Not fitting, but it fits in a more or less satisfying way. Just as the underlying secret of the Hogwarts adventure turned out to be a mother's love, here in Pagford it is a different kind of love that triumphs in the end. Maternal bonds are slender and flawed here, but what really counts are the feelings of strangers for each other. A social worker taking up an unexpected case. A councillor bonding a set of unlikely team mates into a winning combination. A doctor seeing through the boundaries of class and stigma. There is a message here for the modern English, and it is that everyone should try to get along. Try to work together. Try to love one another for what they are, not hate them for what they are not.
I am personally indebted to J K Rowling. My son changed from a child who was read to into a standalone booklover because he couldn't wait for his mother to read the next chapter. There's a story I love to tell about my daughter, babysitting of an evening, telling the mother that she had to rush home to read more Harry Potter. "Aren't you a bit old for Harry Potter?" asked the mother. "I don't think so," my daughter replied. "I have to fight both my parents for reading time."
After a while we just bought two copies of each fresh book on the day of publication and did our best.
I'm looking forward to Rowling's next book, actually. She's still finding her feet as a writer of serious adult fiction after such a massive effort of wizards and giants and goblins and magic, but she has the gift of storytelling, and there's nothing going to stop her. She is over the hump of the successful author, when they know that any old rubbish with their name on the dustjacket will still be a bestseller. The Casual Vacancy is tightly written, well-crafted, beautifully paced, and a joy to read; even if the subject matter is dismal, the story draws the reader along nicely.
This will be a movie in a year's time, no doubt about that, and every twenty-something who grew up with Harry Potter will be buying cinema tickets to see it. Along with their parents.