Just Finished Reading The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling

J.K. Rowling, of course, is the author of the famed Harry Potter series.  After it was all over, she decided to try her hand at adult fiction and consequently came out with The Casual Vacancy in 2012.  I've tried reading it a couple of times in the past and got bogged down...this third time around, though, was the charm and, after finally finishing it,  I look back and wonder why it took me so long...

The Casual Vacancy is set in the present time, in the fictional western English town of Pagford as one its more influential council members, Barry Fairbrother, suddenly dies of an erupted brain aneurism. The politics of the town are thrown into turmoil as a campaign ensues for his replacement while the future of a poverty-stricken area called "The Fields"...on Pagford's outskirts but under its jurisdiction...is up in the air.  Fairbrother had supported defending it but his chief council opponent, deli owner Howard Mollison, wants to turn it over to the nearby town of Yarvil as well as closing down the nearby drug treatment center.  Very early in the story, Rowling introduces many different characters and families up front, unduly taxing the reader's memory..this may have been the one major flaw in this book.  As I was reading, I wondered to myself whether she would ever relent and focus on the characters she had already introduced without constantly adding more...I was gratified that she eventually did this.   When I began reading the book, I felt that the main story was the election campaign and its outcome.  After finishing it, though, I came to a completely different conclusion...

The characters in The Casual Vacancy, their personalities, relationships with one another, and personal substories are what make this novel memorable to me, not the council seat campaign.  It's about compassion for the poor and disadvantaged, to be sure, but also about the different types of families there are out there, how the parents and children function (usually "dysfuntionally") as well as the spouses and boyfriends/girlfriends.  Rowling goes into great detail examining the inner workings of her characters' beliefs and histories...including a lot of stuff they like keeping hidden from others.  The result is a kind of universality of despair pervading most of them, each one suffering in his or her own personal prison.  The author also goes deeply into the minds of the adolescents in the story, in particular Andrew Price, an awkward acne-ridden boy suffering verbal and physical abuse from his father while in love with Gaia Bawden, a pretty and compassionate girl resentful at being moved here away from cosmopolitan London and her friends.  Also, there's Stuart "Fats" Walls, who pursues life for its "authenticity" and is devoid of empathy for others, and Sukhvinder Jawanda, a shy and sensitive victim of Fats's bullying, both at school and on the computer who has resorted to "cutting" as a way of coping with her self-loathing.  And then there is Krystal Weedon, the self-described "good girl gone bad" from the Fields having to cope with her usually-stoned and always-apathetic mother as she tries to take care of her little brother Robbie while continually getting into trouble at school...Barry Fairbrother had made helping her his project and now that he's gone, she's essentially become an abandoned, desperate character...

The Casual Vacancy is an England-based and England-oriented story.  In this sense it reminded me a bit of some of the Ruth Rendell fiction I've read in the not-so-distant past.  This may make some things seem a bit strange for readers on this side of the Atlantic, but the same general issues of local politics, disadvantaged residents and how to deal with them, drug abuse, dysfunctional families, teenage angst, and bullying permeate our society as well.  It was worth reading and I recommend it.  You might, however, just want to get a pen and paper handy to write down the many different characters in order to avoid getting inundated at the beginning...