No Magic Adventures of No Harry Potters

I’ll prove I can write something totally different, decided J.K.Rowling and wrote The Casual Vacancy. Done with Harry Potter series she found another enlightenment represented by small Parish Council elections. No magic, witchcraft and evil forces, just provincial virtues and sins.

I had a feeling throughout the novel I was reading something so trivial that it’s not worth even mentioning. After first 200 pages I still imagined I was travelling on the back of the turtle: still no action, still introduction of the main characters. It even reminded me of my 19th Century English Literature course when thick descriptive style books, which we entitle as classic (no offense here), left me out of time and patience.

Although The Casual Vacancy in the novel is “deemed to have occurred  when a local councilor fails to make his declaration of acceptance of office within the proper time; or when his notice of resignation is received; or on the day of his death”, I see the “vacancy” not in the political terms but those of literary spirit and originality.

The plot is set in a small town of Pagford in UK’s West Country and it begins with the death of the Parish Councillor Barry Fairbrother. A bright man in his forties suddenly drops dead of aneurysm (he had a headache all day long but he had an article for local newspaper to write first, which reminds me of myself here struggling with my own headache…) in the car park of a local golf club just before the dinner with his wife on the day of their wedding anniversary. It’s a shock to all community of Pagford, probably of the same scale as a sudden death of Prime Minister or even the President of the United States. But when everybody recovers from the unexpected news, human practicality takes over – who’s going to take Barry’s seat now?

Small community is diverse and protagonistic, as any other. No doubt, J.K.Rowling skillfully depicts the main characters fighting for the seat at the Parish Council. Although Barry Fairbrother who died in the first pages of the book remains the one who is behind each character and has a strong influence on their actions. Actually with the help of the others we get his personality revealed throughout the book and Barry seems to be the only one whose character is composed, as journalists say, unbiased, i.e. picked up from several sources. While others are just an intended portrait of Pagford community deck of cards.

The Casual Vacancy is called an adult novel but the key actions in the book are initiated by kids. We meet again the Trinity like Harry Potter, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger represented by Andrew Price, Krystal Weedon and Stuart Wall but in this case they are typical teenagers interested in early sex, drugs and bullying. And rebelling against their parents, of course. It seems that the writer herself enjoys developing kid characters, which deliberately or not have parallels with ones from Harry Potter. Like, for instance, Sukhvinder, the class loser, who reminds of Neville Longbottom a lot by turning from a grey mouse into a local heroine. Just Sukhvinder’s desperation is shown as more dramatic disclosed by a masochistic habit to cut herself with a razor.

Rebelling kids are the driver of events in Pagford when Andrew cross with his family abusing father decides to hinder his attempts to win the Council elections and breaks into the Council’s official website to compromise him on the Ghost of Barry Fairbrother behalf. It starts the rolling snowball and turns once quiet Pagford life into Santa Barbara, which, unfortunately, ends in a tragedy.

Actually, while reading The Casual Vacancy I felt like I was watching some British countryside society life series. And surprise surprise, it appears my intuition wasn’t groundless – BBC is making a TV drama to be released next year. It, no doubt, won’t beat six epic Harry Potter movies but at least will gather a curious audience of J.K.Rowling fans to TV screens.

When you have created such a world famous hero as Harry Potter, it should be very difficult to draw a line and move on. As nevertheless, everybody will compare your new works with the previous bestseller (like I just did myselfJ). On the other hand, just the name of a popular author guaranteed J.K.Rowling high sales of her book no matter what it really was about. But who could bear to know which stars were already dead? thought one of the characters in the novel. Exactly, who could?