So, Jo Rowling wrote another book. Let me give you this one quick warning. If you are expecting another wizarding epic - you will be disappointed. If you are expecting another heart-warming young-adult story - you will be disappointed. If you want a cracking good read - you’re in for a bit of a treat.
When you attempt to explain the premise behind this book, it is difficult not to make it sound a little dull:
Person A: “so what is this book about?”
Person B: “errr its a story about a bunch of people in a West Country village and about a Parish Council election.”
Person A: “Well that is a bit dull isn’t it??”
Person B: “But it has lots of interesting relationships between the people wanting to be on the council. Plus it has this girl who comes from this deprived background and…”
I think you get my point. To attempt to explain this story while attempting to not spoil it is tricky. Also, and this really does irritate me, a lot of reviewers seem to fail to be able to divorce this book away from the Harry Potter series, in particular the Guardian review. This book has NOTHING to do with Harry Potter. They share no references, no ideas, nothing. While it may be difficult, we must forget Jo’s other books and review this one in isolation.
Now I must own up to the fact that I am a huge Harry Potter fan, and I could spot her writing style a mile off. Yes this book involves fairly graphic descriptions of teenage sex, drug taking, rape, self-harm and all sorts of other things we’d rather prefer stay on the News BUT she has a writing style that shines through. She is still an incredibly readable author, and I don’t mean that as a criticism. I feel some people seem to put a premium on putting your point across in a very pretentious manner in order to seem more sophisticated. It is not necessary and I wish they’d stop. She also is incredibly gifted at weaving a world into our minds. Even though the world that she describes is our own and the setting fairly familiar to any of us who watch BBC 3, the way she manages to immerse the reader into the story is really quite magical.
There are a great number of characters in this story, so many indeed that it takes you a fair amount of time to get your head around all of the names. They all belong to a series of different families, all of whom at some way link back to one man: Barry Fairbrother. He in many ways is the hero of the story. This is inconvenient because he dies on page 5. He was a champion of the upper-middle class village in which he lived taking care of the deprived town suburb that lay close-by. His acolytes and his enemies on the Parish Council then rush to compete to fill his empty seat: the Casual Vacancy. The race to replace him is full of elitism, snobbery and barely disguised racism and sexism but that is only part of this story. There are also teenagers involved. Some are nice but meek, some are confident and arrogant, some are extroverted but damaged. All are rebellious and tired of the machinations of their parents. These children are often severely misguided in their actions, but then again they are teenagers. They act like them, albeit in a slightly extreme form. Their actions really serve to act as a comparison with the similarly juvenile actions of their parents. In a way the story asks: Who are the real children, and who are the real adults in this story.
This cacophony of passive aggression and in many cases active aggression all builds up to a frenzied and powerful ending, and that is another place where I wish to praise the author. One thing that Jo Rowling is very good at is ending a story - in bringing multiple strands of a complex narrative together and creating a conclusion that is both powerful, sensical and satisfying. So often I find that authors and screenwriters spend all their time throwing the metaphorical chips up into the air and nothing like enough time arranging them once they fall.
This book is far from perfect however. I feel that in her attempts to disassociate herself from her young-adult author past, Rowling enters into some rather odd metaphors and thesaurus-swallowing which can interrupt the narrative a touch. It also can fall a little short when it is very clearly trying to make a political statement. Rowling herself is a big supporter of the Labour Party, and her concern for what she sees as rich elitism trampling over important social programs can sometimes be a bit of a naked reference to many Labour attacks on the current government in the UK.
Having said all of that, I think that this is an excellent book, and I think it is rather underrated. I would be fascinated if this book had been published under a pseudonym. Perhaps it would not have sold so many copies, but I guarantee you there would not have been so many bloody references to Harry Potter!
8/10
Favourite Quotes
- “You must accept the reality of other people. You think that reality is up for negotiation, that we think it’s whatever you say it is. You must accept that we are as real as you are; you must accept that you are not God.”
- “It was so good to be held. If only their relationship could be distilled into simple, wordless gestures of comfort. Why had humans ever learned to talk?”
- “Krystal’s slow passage up the school had resembled the passage of a goat through the body of a boa constrictor, being highly visible and uncomfortable for both parties concerned.”
- ““Stone dead,” said Howard, as though there were degrees of deadness, and the kind that Barry Fairbrother had contracted was particularly sordid.”
- "It frightened people when you were honest; it shocked them."
- “She had a way of moving that moved him as much as music, which was what moved him most of all. Surely the spirit animating that pearless body must be unusual too? Why would nature make a vessel like that, if not to contain something still more valuable?”
- “Both could feel the relationship crumbling to pieces beneath the weight of everything that Gavin refused to say.”
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