Author: J.K. Rowling
Enjoyment Rating: **
This book would be rated: R, for language, sex, and adult themes
Source: Kindle for iPad
Books I've read this year: 124
It took me months to finish The Casual Vacancy. I had it on the Kindle app on my phone, and while I'd normally take a few minutes to read while waiting in the carpool line or at the drive-thru (yeah, I do that), I always found myself opening Facebook instead of the Kindle app as long as I was reading this book. Like most Harry Potter fans, I had high hopes for The Casual Vacancy. I really wanted Rowling to make the jump to being a successful author for adults (although I was fully an adult when I read HP and I enjoyed every minute of the seven books). I know there were a lot of readers out there who were disgusted by the fact that when Rowling writes for adults, she uses language a lot stronger than Ron's "bloody hells" and instead of furtive kisses beneath the shadows of Hogwarts, the teenagers in The Casual Vacancy are getting fully naked under the bushes.
I'm a libertine, at least when it comes to reading about other people getting up to no good, so the sex/drugs/language wasn't what bothered me most about The Casual Vacancy. In the opening pages of the novel, Barry Fairbrother, a member of the Pagford town council, drops dead in the country club parking lot on his way to celebrate his anniversary with his wife. With his seat open (the titular "casual vacancy"), Rowling's narrative focuses on the people who throw their name in for the seat, their families, and others who have a stake in the game. It's an interesting premise, but the way the story unfolded was problematic in a couple of ways. First of all, there were lots and lots of characters presented relatively quickly, and it took me a while to sort them out. Secondly, most of these characters were fairly repugnant. The boys are bullies. The head of the town council will stop at nothing to get his son seated. Everyone snipes and backbites. The one character who I feel that Rowling sort of wants her readers to like, Krystal Weedon, is the foul-mouthed teenage daughter of a junkie who wants a boy to get her pregnant so she can drop out of school. While I don't want or need my characters to be Pollyannas, the unlikeability of these characters reminded me of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom or Jennifer Egan's The Visit from the Goon Squad. Rowling had me on the verge of hating the characters too much to care what happened to them.
Last week, I gave myself a deadline to finish this book. I sat down and forced myself to read, mentally composing a "literary bombs" review as I gritted my teeth. And in the last thirty pages, all of the loose ends of the dozen or so main characters came together, and there was actually a story there, after all. And it was a pretty good (if a bit preachy) story. The bummer is that it took 480 pages to get there.
3 comments:
I quit after 60 pgs. And if it took 480 to come together -- I'm glad I did.
I also quit reading early on. I think I'll stick to Harry Potter for her books.
I read it last week and loved it. It reminded me of the moral epics that Dickens wrote. I had the same feeling about the characters,none of them were likeable. It was only in the last couple of chapters that I finally identified who the protaganist was..and that perhaps the circumstances of her life and the opinions of the other characters had influenced how I viewed her.
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