The Casual Vacancy

Sometimes,  I wonder how many hours of my life have been lost in a book and what I could achieve if I didn't read so much.  Am I avoiding real life by constantly sticking my nose in a book or am I enriching it?  I find it very difficult not to read.  I did try it once, I put myself on a week's reading ban, determined not to read anything at all in the hope of finding my own authentic voice and apart from being an incredibly pretentious thing to do it was almost impossible.  I realised that I searched out words in every room I walked into, for that week I knew the wattage of the kettle, the ingredients in a packet of crisps and Tesco's postcode (actually, I've never forgotten Tesco's postcode; it's EN8 9SL).  The reading probably would be manageable if I could read a page a night but once I'm into a book I have to know.  It becomes an obsession.  Nothing else gets done until it's finished.

This week I have lost 3 whole days of my life to The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling.  It took a long time to get into but then - goodbye world - I was unreachable.  When it first came out I understand that the reviews were not good.  People were disappointed.  They wanted more Wizzards.  They wanted something they would want their children to read.  Ms Rowling was cross, "I'm a writer and I'll write what I want," she said.  Good for her.  Some people (particularly the Daily Mail) thought it was an insult to the middle classes, spouting dangerous socialist ideals.  People seemed to either love it or hate it.  It got one star or 5 stars and not one review assigned it to middle ground.

Despite what the reviews said I thought it was similar to the Harry Potter books. You can tell it was written by the same person.  JK Rowling does not write the most beautiful prose you have ever read but she can write a character and in this book there are several characters, probably too many, which makes the book much longer than it needs to be and a bit confusing until you've worked out exactly who is who.  It is dark, just like Harry Potter and isn't afraid to touch on subjects that most people would rather not think about like death in Harry Potter and quite frankly everything else in this book.

I like my fiction to be dark.  I'm not a great fan of they fluffy bunny living happily ever after kind of story.  I like a bit of gritty realism.  The characters are well observed and to be truthful not very likeable.  The terrible thing is that not only can you see people you know in them, you can also see yourself (I could, anyway) and you just don't like what you see.  To those who say this book promotes dangerous socialist ideas I would argue that it isn't very nice about anyone.  Those who do care about the characters in the book who clearly need help neglect their own families.

There was humour, not jokes but funny observations of people and how they react in certain situations.  A few things irritated me.  I didn't like that one of the teenagers quoted a verse that he'd found on a bookshelf at home that was obviously Nietzsche but acted as thought they didn't know who said it.  I can't believe any teenager would actually quote Nietzsche without naming him.  Teenagers love a bit of name dropping.  I think they're more likely to say Nietzsche than the actual quote.  The other thing that upset me was having the funeral on a Saturday.  I really don't think funeral homes open on a Saturday.

This book did make me think, it did make me sad and it made me feel a bit hopeless.  In some ways the writing reminds me of Dickens, who also said things that people at the time didn't want to hear and drew caricatures of real people for us to delight in.

There are some beautiful quotes in this book, about authenticity, self belief and how people feel.  This, for example, describes perfectly the trauma of being a mother:
"How awful it was, thought Tessa, remembering Fats the toddler, the way the ghosts of your living children haunted your heart; they could never know, and would hate it if they did, how their growing was a constant bereavement."

She forgets to say that seeing the new person they become is also a constant joy but I don't suppose there is much that is joyful in this book.