This is mostly unrelated, but look at it. It's great.
After I was done drooling, I also spotted a copy of J.K. Rowling's first book for adults, The Casual Vacancy, and immediately drunkenly demanded that I be allowed to borrow it. She agreed, after admitting that she only got about halfway through before giving up. That didn't seem to bode well for me, but I took it home anyway.
Summary:
The Casual Vacancy takes place in the town of Pagford, England. At the opening of the book, parish councilman Barry Fairbrother dies of an aneurysm, leaving an opening on the council. Some characters see this opening as an opportunity to further their own agenda, namely, placing someone in that council position that will help them unload The Fields, a poor neighborhood full of all that the town considers undesirable, onto the next town over. We follow a good handful of characters through the changes the death of Barry Fairbrother wreaks on their lives.
As I am writing this, I discover that there is now a BBC adaptation. Well then.
As a reader:
Damn girl, there are a lot of characters here. After Barry Fairbrother dies, there's his wife Mary and their kids; a boy named Andrew Price and his abusive father, doorstop mother and brother; a boy named Stuart 'Fats' Wall, his mother who councils at their school, his father who is the school's principal, has a weird anxiety disorder and is sure he may have at some point molested a student (but really doesn't seem to have); a girl from the Fields named Krystal Weedon who shags Fats, tries to keep her drug-addicted mother going to her rehab clinic and takes care of her little brother; Howard Mollison on the council who is trying to push his son Miles Mollison into the open seat, Miles' wife Sam who ends up snogging Andrew, Miles' business partner Gavin who is secretly in love with Mary Fairbrother but is currently dating Kay Bawden who moved to Pagford for him; her daughter Gaia who Andrew is in love with; the local doctor Parminder Jawanda who Krystal thinks killed her Nana Cath and who secretly hates Howard Mollison enough to lose her job over; and her daugher Sukhvinder who is relentlessly bullied by Fats, befriended by Gaia, and ignored by everyone else who really ends up being the damn hero of the whole mess.
Are you confused? Yeah, that's normal. Rowling's constructed a pretty elaborate narrative here that, I'll be honest, was a huge slog for the first half of the book. I'm pretty good with keeping many characters distinct--Game of Thrones taught me that, thanks--but I found myself tripping up a few times with trying to remember exactly who was who. There's a learning curve here, and thankfully by the second half of the book I've got it. But you've got to have the patience to get there first, which can be a challenge.
Being that Rowling cut her teeth on writing teens, it seems somehow unsurprising to me that the teenage characters in this book are the ones that most hold my interest. Krystal is a tragically identifiable character and, personally, the one I'm most invested in. They are the ones that are driving the major plot points of the story, since three in turn post the damning accusations about the adults who are running for the open council position. It isn't until the teenage characters really start to make these kinds of decisions that the plot really picks up in an interesting way.
As a writer:
Not to harp, but I think the slow pace of the first half of the book was really damning. Goodreads reviews average only 3.24, and the general consensus seems to be that this adult debut just did not live up to the hype of following Harry Potter. If I didn't have a weird obsessive desire to push through even books I don't like, I wouldn't have been able to find the parts of this book that I do.
But I think that is in part made up for in Rowling's fantastic characterization. Of the characters that we spend a significant amount of time with, not a single one is less than fully developed. Even Terri Weedon, Krystal's drug addict mother, has faucets to her personality that exist outside of the generic 'addict' persona and make her a real, believable character.
Lastly, the utter complexity of the narrative is pretty fascinating when you start seeing all the different connections between the characters. The death of this one man triggered so many events: dissolution of a relationship, a complete u-turn of a personality, the deaths of two tragic characters. Each event keeps being tied back into a previous situation, a previous character, or a previous thought. Three other major characters pass by in the final climactic event, and only realize afterwards how close they had been, if they had chosen to intervene. We end on a funeral, with this feeling that they're all looking back, and not so comfortably.
In closing:
"Oh, you think that they should take responsibility for their addiction and change their behavior?" said Parminder.
"In a nutshell, yes."
"Before they cost the state any more money."
"Exact--"
"And you," said Parminder loudly, as the silent eruption engulfed her, "do you know how many tens of thousands of pounds you, Howard Mollison, have cost the health service, because of your total inability to stop gorging yourself?"
A rich, red claret stain was spreadng up Howard's neck into his cheeks.
"Do you know how much your bypass cost, and your drugs, and your long stay in hospital? And the doctor's appointments you take up with your asthma and your blood pressure and the nasty skin rash, which are all caused by your refusal to lose weight?"
As Parminder's voice became a scream, other councilors began to protest on Howard's behalf; Shirley was on her feet; Parminder was still shouting, clawing together the papers that had somehow been scattered as she gesticulated.
Overall: 3 stars.
More reviews: The Casual Vacancy on Librarything (Average 3.44 stars)
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