Book #94: The Casual Vacancy

Book #94: The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling

July 3, 2014


As you might expect, some who've read this book were thrown. This is not the J.K. Rowling that they grew up reading; the Fields ain't Hogwarts, and there's no Dumbledore. Rowling creates a realistic, contemporary community in this story, and through the lives of the various characters, shows different views on the concepts of class and social responsibility. So I'll start by saying that Harry Potter fans who claim to not like this book simply aren't getting it.

As I've written in a previous post, Rowling had her share of hard times. I'm pretty sure that she was on welfare at one point; I quite image that, unlike Terri Weedon, her social worker found her easy to work with. But it's not inconceivable for me to think that Rowling saw people like the Weedons in her experiences; haven't we all? This story is about trying to pass the buck, trying to shirk responsibility. The question is, who isresponsible for helping the poor? What can society do to better understand the causes of poverty, and drug addiction?

Those themes aren't exactly foreign to Harry Potter. The distinctions between wizards who are mixed-blood or "Mudbloods" is clearly a metaphor for racist attitudes. And the whole situation with the Weasleys (a kindly but poor family) and the Malfoys (rich assholes) shows Rowlings feelings about class distinctions and snobbish attitudes as well. In The Casual Vacancy, good and evil aren't exactly black and white (not that they're always so easy to distinguish in those other books, either); we're talking about the real world here, of course.

Pagford is a small, picturesque community in the English countryside. The town is run by a parish council, and while the councilmen and councilwomen had been elected without competition in the past, the political atmosphere has been heating up by the start of the book. Some people in the town want to unload the Fields, a community full of people who are mostly on welfare and many who receive treatment at a methadone clinic, onto the nearby town of Yarvil, which sounds like more of a working class community than middle-class Pagford. Barry Fairbrother (okay, so his name was a little on-the-nose here, as was the name of "Hope Street," where Krystal's grandmother had lived), who had grown up in the Fields but, in spite of this, had become a contributing member of the Pagford community, wanted to fight to keep the Fields part of their town, mostly so the kids there could attend the nice local school. But, at the beginning of the book, he dies of an aneurysm, on his wedding anniversary! His sudden death is a shock to the community, but to his opponents on the parish council, it's also a chance to get rid of the Fields for good.

Various characters get wrapped up in the politics of the election for the open chair, for their own reasons. Simon Price, the biggest asshole in the entire book, runs because he thinks he'll be offered bribes in the position; his son, Andrew, humiliates with him with an anonymous online post about his father's illicit activities. The Price family is interesting enough on their own; Simon is emotionally unstable and violent, and it's more than a little disheartening that his wife Ruth won't do anything to put a stop to his rampages. But Rowling creates a number of interesting families in this book: the Mollisons, with dangerously obese but conniving Howard and greedy Shirley; their son Miles, who wants to be like big daddy, and his wife Samantha, who has huge boobs and fantasies about boy bands; the Wall family, with dumpy but sympathetic Tessa, paranoid Colin, and their adopted son Fats, who is a dickhead; the Jawanda family, with matriarch Parminder (who realizes that she may have been in love with Barry Fairbrother), her handsome husband, and their children, including Sukhvinder, who is insecure, has learning disabilities, and is teased mercilessly by that dickhead Fats Wall, to the point that the poor girl is driven to cut herself; the Bawdens, Kay and her daughter Gaia, who have just moved to Pagford from London so that Kay could pursue a doomed relationship with Gavin, who turns out to be in love with the widow Mary Fairbrother. And, of course, there are the Weedons: Terri, a heroin addict who makes a little progress when Kay comes on as her social worker; her daughter Krystal, a troubled and promiscuous teen who was crushed by Barry Fairbrother's death, as he'd been a mentor to her; and Robbie, a little boy who not only witnessed sexual activity, but was probably molested himself at some point. In spite of all of Krystal's care, Robbie cannot be protected from his mother's lifestyle. From Terri's perspective, she can barely be protected from herself most of the time. So again: who is to take responsibility?

Even though the plot of the story revolves around the open seat in the parish council, it's about so much more than that. I love a story when the characters seem very real, and I felt like most of the characters (whom I've described only briefly and in the simplest of terms) were actually very well fleshed out. Their lives were all intertwined, of course; how could they not be in a town as small as Pagford? Some reviews of this book (I'm talking about Goodreads-type reviews here) stated that the characters were not likable. But I only found that to be true for Simon Price, and maybe Shirley Mollison and Fats Wall; but even for those two, I could sympathize with them to some extent. Not every character was likable all the time, but I found that I could relate to each one of them at one point or another. Colin Wall is an especially interesting character; he suffers from crippling anxiety, OCD, and having experienced a little anxiety myself, I could understand Colin's train of thought, even as he took it to extremes. I wanted justice for Sukhvinder; more specifically, I wanted her to sock Fats Wall in the face. Of course, she was a timid girl, so that didn't happen. At the end, her future is a bit uncertain, but at least her parents have found out about her cutting and her mother isn't being such a bitch to her.

I got into this book, I sympathized with the characters, and I feel like it presented a lot of important questions. The plot was engaging and believable. All in all, it met my requirements for a quality book. I had been wondering if Rowling's magic would translate into other genres, and I believe that it does. I hope that her future works continue to present those tough questions and those grittier realities of life to readers.