The Casual Vacancy
November 2012
A distinct fury, engendered by poverty’s attendant depravations and dehumanisation, along with society’s homogenisation of its underclass, directs J.K. Rowling’s propulsive novel to its devastating conclusion. Squalor and middle class follies are portrayed in their minutiae whilst language is oftentimes explosive, thick with violence. The novel is weighty with its ambitions, starkly realised when it comes to its social conscience, for it confronts the reader with a world that most would rather elide. Undoubtedly bleak, it is also like Dickens (one of the author’s professed literary heroes), scurrilously funny.
Rowling’s control over a staggering cast of characters is formidable and the teenagers, particularly, are keenly filled with longing and rage, egotism and delusions. This is her entry into modernity with small town elections, the funding of housing estates, racism, cyber bullying and self-mutilation. At times prosaic and maudlin, The Casual Vacancy is an uncompromising battle cry against the state of our nations. Having emerged from Anti-Poverty Week with its overwhelming figures of horror – among them the claim that 2.2 million Australians currently live beneath the poverty line – Australians would do well to read it.
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