I loved The Casual Vacancy. What a decimation of British smalltown culture, with their petty concerns, their sad sex lives and their young and aimless. Rowling says it all ‘authentically’, never mind whose point of view she is working from. I don’t know many writers who can delve into the workings of an obese old man, an Indian expat and a teenager with equal ease. She even has a turn of phrase, although her writing style isn’t extraordinary or descriptive: It is to-the-point and tells you everything you want to know. I was interested enough to read it right through, this story about Pagford and its high and low citizens. It was like sitting in the cold kitchen of one of its older residents as she dictated the town’s history to a biographer.
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The high school students are strikingly captured in all their angst, their obsessiveness, their feelings of alienation, things each one of us has lived through and never forgotten. Their parents are blind to their character, too embroiled as they are in trying to figure out their own lives.
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The focal point is the death of a respected man and the vacancy that then needs to be filled in the local council. Enter the contenders, anonymous viper posts on the Net and a gathering free-for-all. There is no sentimentality in the stories being told here. A young girl will die, and although she is both slut and saint, there is no redemption for her. Her world is depicted in gruesome detail, and you almost welcome her death for her sake.
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A boy will lose his sense of self with a single act of cowardice, when all the while you’ve admired his insouciant defiance. A married couple who hate each other will discover there is still love to be found amongst the ruins of over-familiarity and routine gropings in the dark. There are abusive fathers, and you can almost smell the terror of their households, rampant adultery in both mind and body, and the unravelling of established matrons in the most pathetic ways.
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Rowling manages to make them all so real that you can see the movie coming. I admire this woman, especially for flipping the bird at critics carping about non-essentials when readers are simply enjoying the tale she tells.
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Sheba Thayil is a journalist and writer. She was born in Bombay, brought up in Hong Kong, and exiled to Bangalore. While editing, writing and working in varied places like The Economic Times, Gulf Daily News, New Indian ExpressandCosmopolitan, it is the movies and books, she says, that have always sustained her. She blogs at http://shebathayil.blogspot.com/