The Casual Vacancy: How Rowling fails with rapists and tramps

It can’t be easy to be JK Rowling and live up to the frenzy that seven record-shattering books and films have stirred. The first bunch of reviews of J K Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy, therefore, don’t immediately pounce on the Harry Potter author’s first ‘adult book’, probably out of sheer respect for the times she had kept the kids, their college-going neighbours and every third person in the world hooked to a book, and not a mobile phone. Michiko Kakutani writes in the _New York Time_s, “It’s easy to understand why Ms. Rowling wanted to try something totally different after spending a decade and a half inventing and complicating the fantasy world that Harry and company inhabited, and one can only admire her gumption in facing up to the overwhelming expectations created by the global phenomenon that was Harry Potter.” [caption id=“attachment_472660” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  J K Rowling. AFP.[/caption] But then in The Casual Vacancy, we meet drug dealers, rapists, prostitutes and suicidal teenagers. And it doesn’t take long for the disappointment to show. As more reviews come in, her first ‘adult’ novel doesn’t seem to have left the readers raving like Potter and his Hogwarts mates did. One of the reasons why The Casual Vacancy sits uneasily on the minds of the readers is probably the overreaching memories of the Potter books – the lyrical language, the quaint-ified names, and the world that’s strangely real and unreal at the same time. Reason why Allison Pearson writes in The Telegraph:

And so, from the pen that brought you The Leaky Cauldron comes this: “His knuckles in her belly as he undid his own flies – she tried to scream and he smacked her across the face – the smell of him was thick in her nostrils as he growled in her ear, ‘F—–’ shout and I’ll cut yer.’” So much for Hermione Granger.

No wonder she finds The Casual Vacancy so ‘howlingly bleak’ that the book makes ‘Thomas Hardy look like PG Wodehouse’ to her. Easily, Harry Potter was also the triumph of tangible character writing that made a work of fantasy fiction so utterly relatable. Something, that critics seem to have found wanting in Rowling’s new book. David Ulin says in the LA Times, that the men in the novel seem to be pathologically weak, cowering and despicable – something he finds hard to relate to. “These men are despised by their children, but they are portrayed so two-dimensionally that we never feel much is at stake,” he says in his review. And to top it all, while The Casual Vacancy seems to have failed to weave a Potter-worthy magic, some critics have found jarring similarities in narrative, applied to two absolutely disparate genres. Monica Hesse writes in the Washington Post:

Rowling’s signature moves are still there on every page. Just as her boy-wizard series opened with an archly winking look at the upending of the Dursley family’s boring lives, “The Casual Vacancy” does the same with a town. One man suffers an untimely death, the gossip mill churns, and Rowling offers the twinkly observation, “It was all immensely exciting.

  Rowling, surely needs some magic to make this one work!