The Spell Has Broken..

The Casual Vacancy by J K Rowling:

I finally managed to complete it!!!

My opinion of this novel is a blend of like and dislike or more appropriately annoyance, although I am less annoyed now than a few days ago. It took me almost two months to complete it or to be more accurate, it took me two months to read its first half. It is because of this novel that I have 5 books on my currently-reading list. In just could not stick to it and kept on finding something else to read. More than half of it is dull and tiresome. It falls into that category of books that I usually leave unfinished, but I just could not do it with Rowling. In the second half, however, things start to speed up and it moves towards such a disastrous and dramatic end that it changes every single character's life and to a large extent, my opinion as well.

The story is about a small town Pagford and its local politics. It is about petty problems of everyday  which do not sound a great deal to us but they actually define some people's entire life. It shows the result of prejudices and social negligence and of failing to understand the depth of the problems that remain eclipsed by seemingly more important ones.

The most interesting that I found in this book is the way that Rowling has gradually built her different characters that belong to common families from the same small town but are so different in their attitudes. It relates the events that follow the local Councillor Barry Fairbrother's sudden death and now at the end I realize that this death was the cause of so much change and that so much depended on one person.

The Mollisons whose entire life is gossip. They enjoy nothing more that pulling other people's legs. They are materialistic, jealous and prejudiced and feel so self-important that they are not even affected by the graveness of death. Rather they are just happy that it served their prejudice well. Their reaction to Fairbrother's death was that they had a news to tell people and to boast that they knew about it and others did not. They even enjoyed shocking the deceased friend with the news. They considered their dislike of Fields (which was another small town attached to Pagford for which Pagford council had to provide funds) more important than the many problems people would suffer if the two towns' association was broken. And this dislike was something based on a stupid history which really did not involve people who are living in the present. Even after the head of family and notoriously obese Howard Mollison experiences heart attack and is bed-ridden, his wife actually enjoys that she is getting all the attention.

Their first reaction to Fairbrother's death was to celebrate the fact that now they would be able to get rid of Fields, after Howard's son Miles Mollison will take the seat of the Councillor, something his wife is not happy about and they end up place their married life in jeopardy.

Then there are the Jawanda family and Wall family, who were friends and allies with Barry Fairbrother and intend to carry on his good work. Collin Wall, who is also the Headmaster of the local school, decides to participate in the election against Miles Mollison. But Collin Wall has a weak personality and he does not get along well with his adopted son Stuart Wall, who is literally the wild teenager who annoys his parents just for the fun of it.

It feels like half of the novel comprises of parents versus teenagers shouting match, that is painfully customary in Pagford and Fields.

The Jawanda family also have some difficult relationships at home. their youngest daughter Sukhvinder is constantly being compared to her overachieving siblings and she ends up having a habit of hurting herself. Though at last she manages to get the attention of her parents but the account of her life tells the consequences of the parent-children communication gap.

At this point I am realizing that Rowling somehow made it sound so funny. It did not feel like I was reading something that addressed some very serious issues.

Then there are Weedons. They are mostly treated as social outcasts. They are involved in drugs and are living an unruly life. They represent a class of people who are shunned by the society, which fails to understand the causes that shaped their lives and refuses to help them to recover. This family ends up in a catastrophic situation.

The life of the Price family is also interesting in another way. They include a short-tempered, abusing father, a frightened , indecisive mother and two boys with confidence problems.

Its great how Rowling has portrayed simple, common people to be so different for one another and how they cultivate a new generation with the traits that are a consequence of their own.

To sum up: character building was great, writing was good, some things like teenagers' unruly activities and adults' gossip habits were overdone and its end leaves an impact. So in short, worth reading (but don't expect to find any thrill).

Actually I now realize that there are so few books I have ever read talk about society in general. They are mostly about a few characters. They very rarely address different kinds of people and their lives in a social setup. So for me, it was a different type of book. And as I successfully completed it at last, I just want to believe that "All is well that ends well".

I hope J K Rowling keeps writing (children stuff I mean)!