The Casual Vacancy
Aug. 17th, 2013 07:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficTitle: The Casual Vacancy
Author: J. K. Rowling
I can see why Rowling wrote her most recent book under a pseudonym. Because Casual Vacancy has fuck-all to do with Harry Potter, but every single review of it (including this one) starts out with a comparison. All I have to say is, to everyone who has every said that Rowling is a terrible writer, they can stfu and admit that their problem was not with the writing but with Harry Potter being a children's fantasy book. Because Casual Vacancy is not the sort of book that can be written by someone without mastery of the craft.
Casual Vacancy is about a small town in the West Country. At the start of the book, one of the town councilors dies suddenly, in the middle of an acrimonious fight over the disposition of a nearby slum, leaving his crucial seat on the council open. (This is the casual vacancy.) But this book both is and isn't about the subsequent fight over the council seat and the debate over the slum. It also is and isn't about how the dead man was a linchpin that held the lives of many people together.
There are more than twenty POV characters, and another twenty or thirty characters in a constellation around them. It took me more than a hundred pages to remember the names of the key people, but Rowling does a good job of reminding you who everyone is. The action swoops through different characters heads in the same scene, which is something I normally criticize in a writer--usually because they don't realize what they're doing. But here, it's deliberate. It's like the narration is a crane camera, swinging through a crowd scene, popping behind different people's eyes to get their perspective. And when we are in one character's head, we are in it completely--we get how they view the other characters, even if that means they don't know who a given character is.
I could talk about themes for this book--hope, disappointment, prejudice, cowardice, the way the foundations of a relationship play out over decades--but ultimately what it comes down to is I feel like I know these people. For most of the book I'd've been hard pressed to tell you what the plot was, if there was one, but it is an absolute page-turner anyway. Just because the characters are so vivid, they're personal dramas so involving, you just have to see how it plays out.
In the end, the only real similarity between this book and Harry Potter is that I also blew through this--I read more than 300 pages today. Her writing, as always, has a momentum. In the Harry Potter books I thought it was her way of writing a mystery, but it turns out she can do it just as well based on the strength of her characters' voices. So sign me up for anything else she ever writes, seriously.
TRIGGER WARNING: There is both physical and sexual abuse, and some other things that deserve a warning but would completely spoil it, so if you want to know, pm me.
Author: J. K. Rowling
I can see why Rowling wrote her most recent book under a pseudonym. Because Casual Vacancy has fuck-all to do with Harry Potter, but every single review of it (including this one) starts out with a comparison. All I have to say is, to everyone who has every said that Rowling is a terrible writer, they can stfu and admit that their problem was not with the writing but with Harry Potter being a children's fantasy book. Because Casual Vacancy is not the sort of book that can be written by someone without mastery of the craft.
Casual Vacancy is about a small town in the West Country. At the start of the book, one of the town councilors dies suddenly, in the middle of an acrimonious fight over the disposition of a nearby slum, leaving his crucial seat on the council open. (This is the casual vacancy.) But this book both is and isn't about the subsequent fight over the council seat and the debate over the slum. It also is and isn't about how the dead man was a linchpin that held the lives of many people together.
There are more than twenty POV characters, and another twenty or thirty characters in a constellation around them. It took me more than a hundred pages to remember the names of the key people, but Rowling does a good job of reminding you who everyone is. The action swoops through different characters heads in the same scene, which is something I normally criticize in a writer--usually because they don't realize what they're doing. But here, it's deliberate. It's like the narration is a crane camera, swinging through a crowd scene, popping behind different people's eyes to get their perspective. And when we are in one character's head, we are in it completely--we get how they view the other characters, even if that means they don't know who a given character is.
I could talk about themes for this book--hope, disappointment, prejudice, cowardice, the way the foundations of a relationship play out over decades--but ultimately what it comes down to is I feel like I know these people. For most of the book I'd've been hard pressed to tell you what the plot was, if there was one, but it is an absolute page-turner anyway. Just because the characters are so vivid, they're personal dramas so involving, you just have to see how it plays out.
In the end, the only real similarity between this book and Harry Potter is that I also blew through this--I read more than 300 pages today. Her writing, as always, has a momentum. In the Harry Potter books I thought it was her way of writing a mystery, but it turns out she can do it just as well based on the strength of her characters' voices. So sign me up for anything else she ever writes, seriously.
TRIGGER WARNING: There is both physical and sexual abuse, and some other things that deserve a warning but would completely spoil it, so if you want to know, pm me.