The Casual Vacancy is formulaic in technique and style, though Rowling pushes like crazy - and in the face of every obstacle - to tell it like it is, to give us the harsh and horrifying image of the faces that become grotesque and piglike when they are seen in the mirror of the novel that reflects ''life''. Harry Potter was a brilliant fusion of two formulas: the school story and magic (which is also the key to its appeal to children of every age). There is nothing here of the Hogwarts world's effortless transposition of a public-school milieu writ magical and mysterious, or masters of arts black and white who could mix it in the mightiest common rooms of popular fiction - characters who are remote cousins of le Carre's great game players, who owe their allegorical names (Dumbledore, Snape) to Mervyn Peake and Dickens, and who, as casters of the spells of popular fiction, might take tea with Miss Marple and Poirot. What it singularly lacks is the charm that comes with academic gowns and wands. It's a bit like Cranford without the pleasures of small-town life a bit like Coronation Street without the empathy a bit like Shameless without the laughs.īut The Casual Vacancy is also a book that has the kind of ''heart'' that flitters around the corners and borders of the Harry Potter books. The upshot is a book that is true to the side of Rowling that has always revered Jessica, the left-wing Mitford. The Casual Vacancy is never very subtle - it is forever dog-paddling in the depths of the horrors the author chooses to delineate - but it does have a sort of naive grandeur as the most successful writer alive tries to do honour to the rawness of life she must have glimpsed, pre-Harry Potter, of working people and those who will never work doing it hard. It is all executed with a monumental earnestness in a somewhat plodding, sometimes overwritten or inept style, which never gets in the way of Rowling's remorseless dedication to the curve of her story. It throbs with a consistent melodramatic urgency as Rowling scrutinises the unlovely surface of a small West Country town's moral tics and intuits all sorts of pettinesses and meannesses under the surface. The Casual Vacancy is a page turner in the most elementary way.

The casual vacancy book