Casual cruelty in The Casual Vacancy

On JK Rowling's The Casual Vacancy

Launched at Southbank Centre, September 2012

A disclaimer: I am a huge Harry Potter fan. I have read the books more times than I care to admit, and may or may not have dressed up as a snitch: golden sandwich-board-ball, wings and all.

That said, I went to see JK Rowling launch her new novel The Casual Vacancy with slight scepticism, partly because I had seen past interviews in which she appeared somewhat lacking in charisma, or at least forced to forgo charisma for the sake of discretion. But for the launch of her novel at Southbank Centre last month she came across as extremely genuine, engaging and honest. Her desire for the book to be well-received was palpable, as was her acceptance that there could be no discussion of it without reference to the behemoth that is her fantasy series.

Rowling opened up about her preoccupation with death, which presented itself with increasing ruthlessness throughout Harry Potter. She admitted to a crippling sense that, as she says inThe Casual Vacancy, ‘tiny ghosts of your living children haunt your heart’; that life is a constant process of mourning the past. This is something Rowling acknowledged no child would want to know of their parent, and which she followed with an immediate apology to her daughter in the audience. Such frankness is indicative of just how personal she is being in this book – The Casual Vacancy is not simply a ‘500 page socialist manifesto’ as Jan Moir has unforgivingly labelled it, but is a novel that addresses Rowling’s own emotional as well as political concerns. She affirmed that she had been experimenting with adult novels before Harry Potter materialised, fully formed and bespectacled, on that famous napkin, and that this is not a cynical, provocative career move to wrong-foot the critics but is something she ‘couldn’t help but write’.

I was pleasantly surprised, after mediocre reviews, to find that the novel feels on the whole well-written; her slight clunkiness-of-phrase (to employ a somewhat clunky phrase) is offset by the engaging structure and plot. But I have to say that I am now 200 pages in and struggling, not because I don’t think the novel is of a high enough quality but because it is relentlessly depressing.

There is no lovable character to root for. The reader is subject to a constant barrage of insidious suggestions that no one in our country, across the spectrum of the class system and for myriad miserable reasons, is happy. There are some characters with subtle redeeming qualities: the well-meaning but ineffectual school councillor, the ‘f***ed up’ but sympathetically-drawn daughter of a heroin addict. But most are almost entirely, fundamentally unpleasant; from the sinisterly abusive middle-class father to the subtly psychotic teenage boy, all the characters lead you lose faith in humanity.

So, as much as I admire the book, enjoy the writing and respect the writer, I hereby think I will have to abandon it. Perhaps I'll turn to Cider with Rosie instead, another West Country story of a different time and of a very different kind.