I’ve never quite been a Harry Potter fan but the pre-salemarketing buzz around ‘The Casual Vacancy’ enticed me into pre-booking my copyway before it hit the bookshelves. The 503 page book arrived; mysteriouslythick, with a red and yellow coloured cover without graphics. Not what Iexpected. The drama was missing and it took me a whole week before I couldactually get down to reading it. A week later, I could sum the book up bysaying, ‘unadventurous and traditional’.
If you’re looking for an easy, fast-paced, gripping,non-laborious read, this is definitely not the book for you. J K Rowling takesher own time to build the very many characters that shape the book. The scaleand theme of the book is ambitious, but to me the delivery is somewhere lost inthe multitudes of situations, verbal clichés and phrases that have long stoppedbeing used by the current crop of writers.
The book is set in the town of Pagford--a hot-bed ofantagonism, rampant snobbery, sexual frustration and ill-disguised racism andis set to motion when Barry Fairbrother falls dead in a car park of the “smuglittle golf club”. Barry’s death creates a “casual vacancy” on the parishcouncil, and as is expected, the dark forces or his so-called friends try tofit themselves into the open position in order to catapult their socialpositions. Howard Mollison is one such character. The election heats up whenscurrilous but accurate accusations, posted by ‘the Ghost of BarryFairbrother’, start appearing on the council website.
The other characters that play a fair bit of a role in thestoryline include Mollison’s status-conscious wife Shirley, their solicitor sonMiles and his bored wife Samantha; Parminder, a doctor and parish councillorand her daughter Ruth, a nurse married to Simon, who beats her and their sons;Colin, a deputy head with obsessive compulsive disorder; Tessa, his schoolcouncillor wife and Fats (Stuart), their wayward adopted son who indulges ingraveyard sex with Krystal Weedon from the Fields, a nearby estate.
Casual Vacancy has its bits of sex, humour, drugs, abuse,politics, cynicism, smug suburban values, highly visible realism, damagedcharacters, domestic violence and lots more, but does it pack a punch? I do notthink so.
