Skip to main content

The Casual Vacancy


Book Review

Barry Fairbrother dies giving rise to a vacancy in the Parish council.  There are many aspirants for the vacant post.  J K Rowling’s novel, The Casual Vacancy, is partly about the struggles of the aspirants to materialise their dream.  The novel is more about such social issues as juvenile aberration, pornography, drug addiction, and child abuse. 

The novel presents a terribly bleak and partly frivolous world.  Linguistic obscenity hangs heavily on the reader’s mind as he/she turns pages hoping to see some light at the end of the tunnel.  But all that you will get is more and more darkness.  Rowling is writing about a society that shrugs at revelations of evil.  A character in the novel, the adolescent Stuart “Fats” Wall, tries to defeat his father in the Parish council election by hacking into the council’s website and posting a report that his father was a thief, only to realise that “the world, it seemed, had merely shrugged.  Evil is a natural concomitant of existence in such a world.  

Sons and daughters fighting their parents, adults deceiving their friends, parents fighting their children... there’s a whole lot of fighting throughout the novel.  There’s fornication and adultery.  There’s lust of all hues. 

The adolescent “Fats” may be taken as the metaphorical protagonist of the novel.  Apparently he is the only character who is in search of something beyond the given world.  He “had discovered,” says the novel, that other people “were mired in embarrassment and pretence, terrified that their truths might leak out, but Fats was attracted by rawness, by everything that was ugly but honest, by the dirty things about which the likes of his father felt humiliated and disgusted.  Fats thought a lot about messiahs and pariahs; about men labelled mad or criminal; noble misfits shunned by the sleepy masses.”

Fats is on a quest “to be who you really were, even if that person was cruel or dangerous, particularly if cruel and dangerous” [emphasis in original]. 

The novel presents a lot of darkness.  Superficiality and resignation to the status quo.  Varieties of perversions.  The innocent child dies in this world...


PS.  I bought this book tempted by a 70% discount offered by an online seller.


Labels:

Comments

  1. SeetaOctober 28, 2013 at 7:07 PM

    Being a fan of Harry Potter I picked this book up from my Library and to be honest, left it mid way.. somehow she couldnt hold my attention through this one.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 28, 2013 at 7:11 PM

      I was no fan of Harry Potter books though I found the movies interesting. I didn't enjoy reading this book. I would have enjoyed it if it had more passages like the ones I have quoted.

      Delete
  2. UnknownOctober 28, 2013 at 7:34 PM

    Should the book be given a chance as a timepass read during train journey?

    ReplyDelete
  3. RajeshOctober 28, 2013 at 11:21 PM

    Does not look that interesting.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Sanjay SharmaOctober 29, 2013 at 12:08 PM

    Where did you get the 70% discount? I want to see some other books there.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 29, 2013 at 12:26 PM

      IndiaPlaza gives that discount even now. See the following link:
      http://www.indiaplaza.com/searchproducts.aspx?sn=books&q=casual%20vacancy&dn=books
      If you can't access, just log in to indiaplaza.com and search for Casual Vacancy.

      Delete
    2. Sanjay SharmaOctober 29, 2013 at 3:07 PM

      Okay, Thanks

      Delete
  5. UnknownOctober 29, 2013 at 12:56 PM

    Thank you for the warning sir, I was about to pick this up. I couldn't read the Harry Potter series but watched all the movies. I was tempted as people keep saying she is great, now I know that my decision to leave behind this one is correct.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 29, 2013 at 1:04 PM

      You are welcome, Athena. But it's my judgment, however. There have been reviewers who think Rowling is great even in this work.

      Delete
  6. RatOctober 29, 2013 at 6:33 PM

    i downloaded the e-book version but was so disappointed. i quit it after reading the first few chapters. boring book..

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 29, 2013 at 9:48 PM

      It appears there are more people who gave up half way through this novel. I was tempted to do the same. But since I didn't have any other book to read, I ploughed on :)

      Delete
  7. UnknownOctober 29, 2013 at 7:46 PM

    I too was among the band of fools who took this up based solely on the authors skill which she portrayed all along the caricature of harry Potter series. I must have not been surprised when the book fell flat. I may very well be biased in the response as it is unjust to see thi sas an extension of the creative genius of Harry Potter series.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 29, 2013 at 10:03 PM

      Rowling thinks this is one of her best works. Maybe it has some special meaning for her.

      Delete
  8. SidOctober 30, 2013 at 10:50 AM

    Sir why don't you switch to kindle. You'll get most books for free.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 30, 2013 at 11:59 AM

      I don't enjoy reading from electronic screens, Sid. I love books, the very feel of paper.

      Delete
  9. Ujjwal Kumar SenNovember 16, 2013 at 3:52 PM

    Great books, even I like to read from paper books not from kindle, well good blog post.

    ReplyDelete
  10. AnonymousNovember 27, 2013 at 6:40 PM

    I'm not going to pick this one up now. Thanks for the heads up!!

    Niyati

    ReplyDelete
  11. Kokila guptaJuly 18, 2014 at 1:23 PM

    Will steer clear away from it... Your review has made it too clear to me .Thanks !

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
44 comments
Read more

Remedios the Beauty and Innocence

  Remedios the Beauty is a character in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude . Like most members of her family, she too belongs to solitude. But unlike others, she is very innocent too. Physically she is the most beautiful woman ever seen in Macondo, the place where the story of her family unfolds. Is that beauty a reflection of her innocence? Well, Marquez doesn’t suggest that explicitly. But there is an implication to that effect. Innocence does make people look charming. What else is the charm of children? Remedios’s beauty is dangerous, however. She is warned by her great grandmother, who is losing her eyesight, not to appear before men. The girl’s beauty coupled with her innocence will have disastrous effects on men. But Remedios is unaware of “her irreparable fate as a disturbing woman.” She is too innocent to know such things though she is an adult physically. Every time she appears before outsiders she causes a panic of exasperation. To make...
4 comments
Read more

The Death of Truth and a lot more

Susmesh Chandroth in his kitchen “Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought,” Poet Shelley told us long ago. I was reading an interview with a prominent Malayalam writer, Susmesh Chandroth, this morning when Shelley returned to my memory. Chandroth says he left Kerala because the state had too much of affluence which is not conducive for the production of good art and literature. He chose to live in Kolkata where there is the agony of existence and hence also its ecstasies. He’s right about Kerala’s affluence. The state has eradicated poverty except in some small tribal pockets. Today almost every family in Kerala has at least one person working abroad and sending dollars home making the state’s economy far better than that of most of its counterparts. You will find palatial houses in Kerala with hardly anyone living in them. People who live in some distant foreign land get mansions constructed back home though they may never intend to come and live here. There are ...
10 comments
Read more

The Covenant of Water

Book Review Title: The Covenant of Water Author: Abraham Verghese Publisher: Grove Press UK, 2023 Pages: 724 “What defines a family isn’t blood but the secrets they share.” This massive book explores the intricacies of human relationships with a plot that spans almost a century. The story begins in 1900 with 12-year-old Mariamma being wedded to a 40-year-old widower in whose family runs a curse: death by drowning. The story ends in 1977 with another Mariamma, the granddaughter of Mariamma the First who becomes Big Ammachi [grandmother]. A lot of things happen in the 700+ pages of the novel which has everything that one may expect from a popular novel: suspense, mystery, love, passion, power, vulnerability, and also some social and religious issues. The only setback, if it can be called that at all, is that too many people die in this novel. But then, when death by drowning is a curse in the family, we have to be prepared for many a burial. The Kerala of the pre-Independ...
14 comments
Read more

Koorumala Viewpoint

  Koorumala is at once reticent and coquettish. It is an emerging tourist spot in the Ernakulam district of Kerala. At an altitude of 169 metres from MSL, the viewpoint is about 40 km from Kochi. The final stretch of the road, about 2 km, is very narrow. It passes through lush green forest-looking topography. The drive itself is exhilarating. And finally you arrive at a 'Pay & Park' signboard on a rocky terrain. The land belongs to the CSI St Peter's Church. You park your vehicle there and walk up a concrete path which leads to a tiled walkway which in turn will take you the viewpoint. Below are some pictures of the place.  From the parking lot to the viewpoint The tiled walkway A selfie from near the view tower  A view from the tower Another view The tower and the rest mandap at the back Koorumala viewpoint is a recent addition to Kerala's tourist map. It's a 'cool' place for people of nearby areas to spend some leisure in splendid isolation from the hu...
30 comments
Read more