I’m on a real JK Rowling kick this year. I’m currently in the middle of the audiobooks of the Harry Potter series, and after The Cuckoo’s Calling, I listened to The Casual Vacancy. (Her stuff is very easy to get as audiobooks).

This is the first book she published after Harry Potter and this one was under her own name. It got mixed reviews, I think, because everyone compared it to Harry Potter. It’s not Harry Potter and if you’re expecting it to be like that, you’re going to hate it.

It starts with Barry Fairbrother keeling over dead of an brain aneurysm and then really slows down for, what I’d guesstimate was, the next 100-150 pages. A ‘casual vacancy’ is the opening of a local public office seat when someone dies while in office. In this case, Barry Fairbrother. Anyway, this vacancy opens up a whole mess of issues with different people around town, from other council members to local kids.

I thought the most compelling character in the whole book was Krystal Wheedon, who was on the school rowing team coached by Fairbrother. She’s 16, very poor, and she’s taking care of her baby brother Robbie. Her mother is a useless heroin addict who prostitutes herself when she needs a fix. A lot of the tension in the book comes from parts of the council who want to push ‘The Fields’ – a low income part of town – off on another town which, these council members feel, the other town tricked them into incorporating. Krystal lives in The Fields, and Barry grew up in  The Fields. Barry wanted to keep The Fields, arguing that the kids there have bright futures. Once he dies, other people start plotting against him.

Eventually, a bunch of kids end up hacking the town council website and post a number of humiliating secrets about council members under the username “The Ghost of Barry Fairbrother” to get revenge on their parents, friends, etc… it sends a lot of the characters’ lives into disarray.

If you were looking for something even remotely close to Harry Potter, this wasn’t it. I didn’t hate it. I didn’t love it, but it wasn’t as awful as the worst reviews stated. The positive reviews for the most part seemed to be right on: it was a very slice of life, this could be happening anywhere type of novel. It wasn’t bad, but it was, overall, very depressing/disturbing. You didn’t really leave it feeling very good about how it wrapped up and it sort of just ends, like many events in life just end. Nothing really changes, which is true of life too, in a lot of ways.

The only good thing is one deplorable character ends up alone, which he deserves for being such a sniveling coward.

People who like those realistic novels will really enjoy The Casual Vacancy. For those of you who want a little bit more “escape from reality” in your stories, this probably isn’t the book for you.

Tagged: authors: jk rowling, books: the casual vacancy, genre: contemporary fiction