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

Pranita a perverted genius

Bulldozer begins its work at Sawan Pranita was a perverted genius. She had Machiavelli’s brain, Octavian’s relentlessness, and Levin’s intellectual calibre. She could have worked wonders if she wanted. She could have created a beautiful world around her. She had the potential. Yet she chose to be a ruthless exterminator. She came to Sawan Public School just to kill it. A religious cult called Radha Soami Satsang Beas [RSSB] had taken over the school from its owner who had never visited the school for over 20 years. This owner, a prominent entrepreneur with a gargantuan ego, had come to the conclusion that the morality of the school’s staff was deviating from the wavelengths determined by him. Moreover, his one foot was inching towards the grave. I was also told that there were some domestic noises which were grating against his patriarchal sensibilities. One holy solution for all these was to hand over the school and its enormous campus (nearly 20 acres of land on the outskirts
8 comments
Read more

Machiavelli the Reverend

Let us go today , you and I, through certain miasmic streets. Nothing will be quite clear along our way because this journey is through some delusions and illusions. You will meet people wearing holy robes and talking about morality and virtues. Some of them will claim to be god’s men and some will make taller claims. Some of them are just amorphous. Invisible. But omnipotent. You can feel their power around you. On you. Oppressing you. Stifling you. Reverend Machiavelli is one such oppressive power. You will meet Franz Kafka somewhere along the way. Joseph K’s ghost will pass by. Remember Joseph K who was arrested one fine morning for a crime that nobody knew anything about? Neither Joseph nor the men who arrest him know why Joseph K is arrested. The power that keeps Joseph K under arrest is invisible. He cannot get answers to his valid questions from the visible agents of that power. He cannot explain himself to that power. Finally, he is taken to a quarry outside the town wher
19 comments
Read more

Levin the good shepherd

AI-generated image The lost sheep and its redeemer form a pet motif in Christianity. Jesus portrayed himself as a good shepherd many times. He said that the good shepherd will leave his 99 sheep in order to bring the lost sheep back to the fold. When he finds the lost sheep, the shepherd is happier about that one sheep than about the 99, Jesus claimed. He was speaking metaphorically. The lost sheep is the sinner in Jesus’ parable. Sin is a departure from the ‘right’ way. Angels raise a toast in heaven whenever a sinner returns to the ‘right’ path [Luke 15:10]. A lot of Catholic priests I know carry some sort of a Redeemer complex in their souls. They love the sinner so much that they cannot rest until they make the angels of God run for their cups of joy. I have also been fortunate to have one such priest-friend whom I shall call Levin in this post. He has befriended me right from the year 1976 when I was a blundering adolescent and he was just one year older than me. He possesse
8 comments
Read more

Kailasnath the Paradox

AI-generated illustration It wasn’t easy to discern whether he was a friend or merely an amused onlooker. He was my colleague at the college, though from another department. When my life had entered a slippery slope because of certain unresolved psychological problems, he didn’t choose to shun me as most others did. However, when he did condescend to join me in the college canteen sipping tea and smoking a cigarette, I wasn’t ever sure whether he was befriending me or mocking me. Kailasnath was a bundle of paradoxes. He appeared to be an alpha male, so self-assured and lord of all that he surveyed. Yet if you cared to observe deeply, you would find too many chinks in his armour. Beneath all those domineering words and gestures lay ample signs of frailty. The tall, elegantly slim and precisely erect stature would draw anyone’s attention quickly. Kailasnath was always attractively dressed though never unduly stylish. Everything about him exuded an air of chic confidence. But the wa
9 comments
Read more

Nakulan the Outcast

Nakulan was one of the many tenants of Hevendrea . A professor in the botany department of the North Eastern Hill University, he was a very lovable person. Some sense of inferiority complex that came from his caste status made him scoff the very idea of his lovability. He lived with his wife and three children in one of Heavendrea’s many cottages. When he wanted to have a drink, he would walk over to my hut. We sipped our whiskies and discussed Shillong’s intriguing politics or something of the sort while my cassette player crooned gently in the background. Nakulan was more than ten years my senior by age. He taught a subject which had never aroused my interest at any stage of my life. It made no difference to me whether a leaf was pinnately compound or palmately compound. You don’t need to know about anther and stigma in order to understand a flower. My friend Levin would have ascribed my lack of interest in Nakulan’s subject to my egomania. I always thought that Nakulan lived
16 comments
Read more