The Casual Vacancy

I've read The Casual Vacancy. In April, we found out the title of the book, leading to heavy speculation regarding what it would be about. "It's not for children!" was bandied about quite a lot.

And it's not. It's very much the anti-thesis to Harry Potter. 

But I'd be disappointed in anyone who says J.K Rowling can't write after reading it. I can see why it might not be everyone's cup of tea; it's brutal and bleak and distinctly non-magical. There are no miracles in this book. The lines between good and 'evil' are heavily blurred. But then, 'evil', in this context at least, is quite subjective. I suspect most evil-doers aren't consciously committing acts of evil, particularly the ones in this story. After all, everyone is the hero in their own story, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the shallow but idyllic village of Pagford. Beautiful, historic Pagford with its rolling fields and quaint cottages. And its poverty-ridden council estate. 


And there is the crux of the book; all of the action contained within boils down to the problem of the Fields council estate. Pagford, sadly understandably, doesn't want it. They don't want to pay for it, they don't want the children that live there in their schools, or on their streets. But then Yarvil, the neighbouring 'big town'  doesn't want it either. Barry Fairbrother, a former Fields boy-gone-good, thinks that with the right help, everyone from the Fields has a shot at a decent, educated and drug-free life. The Parish Council strongly disagrees. So when poor old Barry drops dead on his wedding anniversary, battle lines are drawn between those want to continue Barry's fight and those who want nothing more than to fence off the Fields from their beloved village.

It's a winding sort of book; I realised three-quarters of the way through that I'd been cleverly drawn into a web of deceit and anger, without even noticing it. Characters are introduced rapidly, at first it can be hard to keep up with the myriad of personalities and their foibles, but at some point it just clicked and I felt as though I lived in the village, and was watching the events unfold alongside the cast, albeit with a lot more foresight than they had. 

And then I realised I didn't particularly like any of the characters. There were a few I didn't dislike, as such, and a few I outright wanted to slap, but none I felt a true connection with and that phased me at first. I'd always believed that one of the first rules of writing a successful story was to create an engaging character, someone you could see with qualities similar to your own, a hero or heroine to connect with, if you will. I'd always thought that you had to see through their eyes to be able to endure their struggles with the appropriate amount of understanding. 

But there is no-one in this book I truly connected with and yet I really enjoyed it. It was bitter-sweet to watch these lives unfold, to see how it spiraled out of control, how little things added up to make big things. I saw it head, ever swiftly, towards disaster and observed the minutiae of the characters' worlds exposed, literally in some cases. Some of their struggles, their dreams seemed so petty, some seemed almost ludicrous in their ambitiousness. This book goes beyond the characters to tell a story and it's the first time I've experienced that. But I wanted more. I marathoned through the book, and had that sense of delicious bleakness at the end that comes when you've left a bit of yourself inside the world you've just left. There were tears, and most bizarrely, the tears stemmed from a sense of impotent guilt, that I'd seen this coming, I knew the whole story and yet could do nothing to stop it from reaching the inevitable climax. In that, I think for the first time I made some connection with the characters. That I stood with them, aghast at my inability to do anything. And equally, at the end I closed the book and walked away, relatively unscathed, just as a lot of them did too. 

It's an uncanny, honest and fairly ugly depiction of the human condition at its worst, exposing all of the pettiness and greed that people harbour inside themselves when they forget they're just a small cog in a big machine, when they become or try to become insular and independant. But there is also hope. The Casual Vacancy comes chock-full of hope, and that's what makes it so compelling, in my opinion. That each character, for all their faults, dreams of it getting better, in whatever way they can.

It really is a good book. 

Best of all, my copy is signed by the lady herself! I was lucky enough to have secured tickets to go to the launch of A Casual Vacancy at the Southbank Centre on Thursday 27th September. After falling down the stairs and nearly killing myself (Ha, like that would've stopped me) Jules and I made our way into London, said hello to the usual suspects and settled in for a giddy evening listening the woman who is mostly responsible, however indirectly, for me being the person I am.


I won't bore you with the platitudes of it, but I did get emotional, in both the teary and the beaming sorts of ways, and I did manage to blurt a very heartfelt 'Thank you', at Jo when she was signing my book (she was drinking white wine, we should be best friends. I knew it). I was also 'quoted' in an (ahem) Daily Mirror article about it. By 'quoted', I mean they used a tweet which said I'd got the book, and the accompanying photo, and tweeted back at me to say they'd used them. Ah, the wonders of journalism.

A video can be seen here of the event, which featured a short reading, Jo being interviewed about the book, another reading and then questions from the audience. I did wave my hand about a bit, but was sadly not chosen, so instead I asked my question to anyone who stood vaguely near me in the queue. No-one knew the answer. Or they didn't care because why am I talking to them when J.K-blinking-Rowling is just over there...

It was an amazing night. I'm still in the phase where I'm clutching it to my heart a bit, being a little cagey about it because I'm still not 100% convinced it happened. But it did. And I was there. And I've read the book and I liked it. I liked it very, very much.