Book Review - The Casual Vacancy

The very first thing I'd say about The Casual Vacancy is, that most people will not find it to be what they expected earlier. They would be surprised and in many cases disappointed. And that any and everything about the book was kept like the secret of The Holy Grail along with a drab cover couldn't help it much either. Still, there are things to like in the book, like the strong characters and the trademark Rowling style narration. But first, the book's blurb,

--- When Barry Fairbrother dies in his early forties, the town of Pagford is left in shock.

Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty façade is a town at war.

Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils ... Pagford is not what it first seems.

And the empty seat left by Barry on the parish council soon becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen. Who will triumph in an election fraught with passion, duplicity and unexpected revelations? ---  

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The Casual Vacancy
By J.K. Rowling
503 pp | Little Brown
$35 | Rs850
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I'd like to start with some warnings. Before you start reading this novel, make sure

- that you are not reading it just because it's written by J. K. Rowling and expecting something magical to pop out of it. Read the blurb then decide.

- to remember that it is not a crime-thriller nor a murder-mystery.

- you have the patience and interest in reading something different (slow paced) for a change.

Now, the story is set in a fictional, supposedly idyllic little town of Pagford where after one of the members of the parish council, Barry Fairbrother dies in the first three pages, the rest 500 are all about the events which take place in and around the town, resembling a tower of finely balanced objects crashing and tumbling down after the councillor's death which acts like the needle on which it was stacked getting pulled out.

After Barry's death, Pagfordians form into opposing groups, one of those who, like the always a little too nervous Colin Wall, deputy headmaster of the local comprehensive and the seemingly always stiff(mostly for her sorrow at Barry's death) doctor Parminder Jawanda, another member of the parish council, want to take forward the legacy Barry Fairbrother left behind and oppose the others, headed by the obese owner of the local delicatessen Howard Mollison, who happens to be the chair of the council and his partners, who want to get a better hand in the parish council, mostly aiming to cut-off the nearby council estate, the 'don't-go-there kid' type of block known as Fields off their chart and shut off the drug rehabilitation clinic.

The book doesn't have a lively story and it doesn't pretend that it has. You can make that out pretty well. It mainly focuses on describing the small workings that lead up to the election of the parish council and which, quite frankly seemed to be taking too much time. Specially, the explanation of Pagford's past and the repetitions of the loyalty and craving that Howard and gang seemed to be having for the old-perfect Pagford did felt unnecessary to me.

While the story is nothing you would forget the rest of the world for, the character description and their thought process gets your attention fair enough. It's another thing that some of the characters are just too tight moulded and that almost all of them are either completely vile, offensive or incapable and barring one or two, there's nothing about their personality to develop a liking to. The narration as I said earlier is trademark Rowling and you do get a dose of those funny one-liners which I think none other than the author is capable of. But, you get to experience all this once you pull off the first 50 pages of confusion, sleepiness and annoyance at what is happening and a nagging voice in your head that urges you to put the book back on the shelf. After that, things slowly start falling into place and get interesting.    

The first official statement you might have heard about the book would've been 'J.K. Rowling's first novel for adults'. Well, that word adult doesn't really mean that it's a mature, subtle version of a world like harry potter. The adult literally means Adult, like the A-certificate adult. The book is filled with things like drugs, domestic violence, unrestrained teenage sex, suicide, rape and cuss words, lots of them. These all apart from other imaginative sexual phrases like 'It is common knowledge that -spoiler- holds regular tastings of -spoiler-'s finest salami' and some others which I better not mention here. 

Despite all this, and this might not hold true for everybody, I did found the book interesting, when I detached the expectations that came with the author's name from it and focused on the text at large. It's slow paced as I said before, but it doesn't mean that it's boring. The want of knowing what'll happen to the characters, especially of Sukhwinder, daughter of Parminder Jawanda, at the end of the book kept me hooked till finish. Though I'd still say that taking out some pages from the BIG NOVEL wouldn't have hurt it much. 

So yeah, that's all what I have to say about it. The book is recommended to those who'd like to take a shot at the insides of an un-romanticised depiction of muggle world, and to those feeling like reading the politics of local English governance. It is definitely not for those who don't like the use of too much swearing, bitching, beatings and brutalities of life in general in their book. I'd rate it 3.5/5, mostly for the latter part of the book.

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Disclaimer: The links to the online shopping stores in the review are for quoting purposes only and do not mean that they offer the best price. Nor do they imply any sort of recommendation from me.

The image is taken from NYTimes.