Those lobbying against the Fields-including Howard Mollison, Pagford’s de facto mayor, and his lawyer son-seek to exploit Barry’s death for their own political gain.

Barry was on the side of the angels-a minority position, naturally. The most obvious hole his death leaves is his seat on the town council, which has been in the midst of a protracted battle between those who hope to retain the town’s responsibility for a depressed housing development on its outskirts called the Fields, and those who would redraw the boundaries to exclude the area. The “casual vacancy” results from the sudden death of the well-liked Barry Fairbrother, who turns out to have a far less benign impact on his friends and neighbors in death than he did in life. If the central themes in the Harry Potter series were necessarily broad-brush-namely, the struggle between good and evil- The Casual Vacancy feels more like a mosaic: a lot of little pieces, some better formed than others, that ultimately come together into something like a coherent, if depressing, whole. But once a central narrative starts to emerge, the result is penetrating and pleasantly acerbic. Weighing in at five hundred pages, The Casual Vacancy is a loose, baggy novel with too many characters, and it spends far too much time bouncing among them, leaving the reader confused about who exactly matters here and why. It’s a long journey from Hogwarts to the village council chamber.īut Rowling is such a good storyteller that she could rewrite the telephone book and make it readable, and that’s essentially what she does here. Finding out-it’s what happens when a council member dies in office-doesn’t make the novel sound any more appealing. Most American readers have no idea what a “casual vacancy” is. For starters, she couldn’t have chosen a less promising subject. Rowling’s mega-selling children’s book series that one wonders if Rowling deliberately tried to make her first novel for adults conform as little as possible to her readers’ expectations. The Casual Vacancy is so different from J.K. IT’S NOT HARRY POTTER-let’s just get that out of the way first.

Jk rowling the casual vacancy review