Book review: The Casual Vacancy

I do like to be awkward, so while everyone else was going on about J.K. Rowling dragging up as Robert Galbraith, I was catching up with her first non-Potter book written under her own name, The Casual Vacancy. I'd been a bit wary of it as its reputation precedes it, as one of the books most likely to be given up on halfway through and a really dark affair. It's certainly a departure from the family-friendly books she made her name with although anyone who'd paid attention to them would have known the strong feelings she brings to the fore here: The Casual Vacancy is populated almost entirely by characters like the Dursleys.

The story is set in the determinedly middle-class small town of Pagford in the Westcountry, its affairs run by a local council as there's a larger town nearby that deals with bigger issues. The book's starting point is the surprise death of one of these councilors, and one of the few people who seemed to care about the poverty-stricken estate that occupies the borders, and which the insular people of Pagford would like to see offloaded on their larger neighbour as their responsibility.

The barely-concealed reality is that the relatively well-off people of Pagford have contempt for their needier neighbours, as exemplified by the wayward teenager Krystal Weedon, the daughter of a drug addict, and in her attempt to make sense of the world alternately repellent and in some ways admirable. Of course the people of the town only see her as a monster, and with a vacancy on the council they hope to get someone more sympathetic to their cause in to make sure she and her like are no longer their problem.

I actually found the book pretty involving, it's a portrait of a whole town that builds up a lot of individual character studies. It's occasionally witty but mostly it's a very angry book, Rowling's feelings about middle-class NIMBYs never disguised, with barely any character not displaying some pretty horrific side. Even when, as here, I completely agree with the author's politics, I can get a bit frustrated when they hammer it home to this extent so that was an occasional irritant, as was the way Rowling writes Krystal's dialogue, rather overegging her poor grammar. But overall I found it worth a read - although I'll definitely need something a lot lighter next to cheer me up.