The Casual Vacancy

[BlueCalx]

Is anyone lugging around a handsome, costly, red and yellow book on public transit this fall? I am, and I've enjoyed the sixty pages I've read so far. The book's taking a kicking in the press, some kicks coming from reviewers who, taking Puritan morality for a test drive for the first time, are shocked at its naughtiness! Won't someone please think of the children?

[littlemonkey613]

Please write your overall opinion when your done! I worship lady Rowling.

[BlueCalx]

As you wish.

I finished it today. I liked it. It isn't her masterpiece, but it succeeds far more often than it fails. Choosing a narrative style that switches perspective every four pages or so was a gutsy move, I think: writing in so many different voices tends to put a writer's flaws under the microscope. One can tell which characters Rowling especially sympathizes with and which are a means to an end, but some passages concerning her favourite characters are downright unforgettable. No one I've read writes teenage boys as well, the Fats Wall and Andrew Price characters are extremely lifelike. It's fun to trainspot for tropes. She seems to like big, funny fat men as comic foils. The book is an odd blend of comedy of manners and grim-faced commentary on addiction and poverty that somehow manages to work. I probably wouldn't have picked this book up if it weren't for the name of the author - literary fiction concerning social justice gives me a rash. This didn't give me a rash, though. I'm confident I would've enjoyed it as much if it was someone else's first published effort.