J.K. Rowling does 'mommy porn'?
It must be the literary event of the season: J.K. Rowling coming out with her first “adult” novel after the megalithic Harry Potter series. The big question on readers’ lips: Would it feature “adult” situations, removing the shackles of children’s lit? Would Rowling portray teens speaking in modern everyday English, wearing modern clothes, and swearing in languages other than Latin? Would she be going “Grey,” in the parlance of avid Fifty Shades of Grey readers?
Well, yes, yes and maybe. Released on Thursday, Sept 27 (early copies were packaged in a nifty canvas bag that doesn’t completely shed the Potter look), the novel, The Casual Vacancy, does deal with the here and now, with nary a wand or wizard hat in sight.
“What’s it about?” was all anyone could ask when I first cracked open the advance copy. It’s about a parish councilor who unexpectedly dies in a small English town called Pagford, and the 40 or so other characters who knew him, loved him, and/or are jockeying for his vacant seat.
It’s also 500 pages long, which means I couldn’t race through it at the pace of a Harry Potter installment. Much in the spirit of Potter books, Rowling takes her sweet time setting the “plot” (such as it is) in motion. By page 300, you kind of see where’s she’s heading.
When Barry Fairbrother, 44, is struck down suddenly by an aneurysm near his golf club one day, the novel tracks the events that unfold as a number of parishioners scramble to fill his councilor seat — a matter of considerable interest among Pagford citizens.
Among them are Miles Mollison, a lawyer whose father Howard had long held a seat of power; Mary Fairbrother, widow of the popular and well-loved deceased; Colin Wall, a school administrator; and Simon Price, a blue collar type who beats his wife and smacks his kids around. The main divisive issue is a stretch of land lying between Pagford and neighboring town Avril called The Fields, where low-rent housing has led to a generation of adults with little hope, who often turn to drugs and crime; and their kids, who try to assimilate into St. Martin’s preppy public school in Pagford.
St. Martin’s isn’t much like Hogwarts. The boys wear blazers and the girls wear skirts, but that’s where the similarity ends; there’s little “magic” to be found. They do like to swear and smoke a lot and lash out at their parents, something Harry Potter’s crowd were never allowed to do.
Rowling seems quite interested in laying down the day-to-day roots of the town, detailing the many interrelated lives of the citizens of Pagford, their back stories and their feelings about one another. So this is an old-fashioned, almost 19th-century psychological novel of manners, with Brits acting one way on the surface and experiencing a tsunami of inner conflicts within; such inner conflicts are either introduced via flashbacks (these are set off with parentheses to signal that the character is drifting into flashback amid, say, a conversation at a dinner party) or via italics, often at ironic variance with what the characters are actually saying. (Example: Oh, f*ck off, Shirley, followed by what’s actually said: “I suppose you’re right, Shirley.”)
The Casual Vacancy moves at a deliberative pace, each character mulling over in private a perceived slight or hidden meaning in every nuance of their neighbors’ language. Thus it’s largely an interior novel, since the time frame is not very long. Time in Pagford does seem to move slower than in other parts of the world, and even though the novel introduces modern conveniences such as the Internet, computers and cell phones, information passes through a human time shredder of deliberation and reflection. Even when some kids hack into a website and post about the malfeasance of a potential councilor candidate (using the name “The_Ghost_of_Barry_Fairbrother”), Rowling has the townspeople spread the word not at lightning speed, but through that quaintly old-fashioned device: the landline telephone. Thus, rumors spread in Pagford at roughly the same speed as grass growing in the Sahara.
If there’s any “magic” afoot in The Casual Vacancy, it’s cooked up by the disgruntled kids, who use something called “SQL injection codes” to go online and spread increasingly vicious, personal gossip about those running for office. The citizens of Pagford — who presumably are baffled by technology, although they seem capable of putting up websites and own cell phones — react to the online gossip as though it’s an actual ghost rattling its chains across cyberspace. Few of them suspect their own overlooked, misunderstood kids are behind it; after the third posting, it doesn’t even occur to them to close down the website which is obviously compromised. (Ironically, the kids’ posts, under British law, would be free from libel charges; but in the Philippines, under newly enacted RA 10175, their actions, even in jest, would be deemed a “cybercrime.”)
It’s clever of Rowling to turn the “magic” of the Hogwarts world into the everyday hocus-pocus of technology (which, as we know from Arthur C. Clarke, is indistinguishable from magic). The kids concoct their own wizardry, not out of some desire to save the world, as in Harry Potter’s case, but simply out of spite.
Amid the plodding plot, Rowling’s real cause seems to be advocating a raft of liberal causes — drug treatment clinics, the protection of children from abuse, and other laudable aims. Mostly, these concerns are woven into the plot with a deft hand. As a follow-up to one of the most successful fiction franchises in history, The Casual Vacancy does not exactly glimmer and sparkle; yet Rowling is a gifted writer, and she handles the details of Pagford well, and carefully, at her own studied pace, even as the story takes a dizzying left turn into tragedy in its final section.
As for the “Grey” question, Rowling does not go completely mad, though she does introduce adult situations, language and behavior well beyond the chaste snogging of Hogwarts. This isn’t exactly a woman dashing off “mommy porn,” though she does seem to get into the spirit of things, with characters swearing, screwing and lusting more than she ever could have allowed in her previous series. Admittedly, 10 years of writing about invisibility cloaks and snitches must have left Rowling feeling pretty pent up, gagging to shift some “adult” prose for a change. The character who displays the most “mommy porn” potential is the middle-aged Samantha, she of the deep cleavage and oversize brassiere business, who fantasizes about her daughter’s favorite boy band members and lusts after a certain Indian surgeon in town. Along with the good-hearted but potty-mouthed teenager Krystal Weedon, you end up appreciating Samantha’s candor; like a breath of fresh air, her comments and interior thoughts, while often cruel, can also be closest to the truth. Like when a bunch of Pagfordians are discussing who might have tampered with the council website; most suspect an “inside job,” while Samantha wilts on a nearby sofa, glugging her wine in utter boredom:
They were perfectly ridiculous, Samantha thought, sitting here in front of Shirley’s commemorative plates as if they were in the Cabinet Room in Downing Street, as though one bit of tittle-tattle on a Parish Council website constituted an organized campaign, as though any of it mattered.
It’s a point I couldn’t help thinking to myself, at times, getting through The Casual Vacancy, which often reads like a slow episode of Downtown Abbey. Though not quite as magical.
