The Casual Vacancy – Book Club write up by Serena Alam

Posted on March 11, 2013 in Uncategorized

January book club met to discuss J.K. Rowling’s debut adult novel The Casual Vacancy. Here is what the book clubbers thought:

Someone who was present at the book club meet but had not had a chance to read the book was curious to know if anyone had found the book to be boring. We all replied ‘No!’ and someone also remarked that it was impossible to find the book boring because all the characters seemed to hate each other.

No-one seemed to particularly like any of the characters, but we felt that if we did have to choose one character that we liked, it would be one of the teenagers; either Andrew or Sukhvinder.

We felt that at times, readers were given more detail than was necessary. For example, we didn’t need to be told that Howard’s wife, Shirley wanted to be like Mary (and behave and feel like a grief-stricken widow), when Howard became hospitalised after his heart-attack. This part of the story occurs towards the end and there’s a lot of mention of Shirley throughout the book; thus by now you could predict that Shirley would behave in this fashion. Another aspect of the book that we felt contained too much detail, was the mother-daughter relationship between Kay and Gaia. Someone said that they were glad that Gaia and Andrew didn’t get together in the end, although others would’ve liked it if they had.

We were saddened by the fact that the front-page piece in the Yarvil and Distrct Gazette about Krystal Weedon’s little brother, had painted the picture that Krystal was a junkie like her mother, Terri. Krystal had actually taken Robbie out of the house to get him away from Terri’s dealer; she was by no means a junkie like Terri.

We found it both odd (and perhaps frustrating) that in a small town like Pagford, no-one was asking little Robbie where his parents were, when he was down by the river by himself. When Gavin was on his way to Mary’s house he noticed that Robbie was sitting by himself on a bench, but didn’t even have a look around to see if there were any adults or at least older siblings supervising him.

We really disliked Fats. We felt he was a really bad friend to Andrew; not only did he kiss Gaia at the party, but he also let Andrew get in trouble with his father. We felt that Ruth Price didn’t ever explain why Simon was so abusive to his children. Although, perhaps this was done deliberately to help portray Ruth as a passive mother and wife.

Also discussed was whether or not it would’ve been hard for J.K. Rowling to make the transition from writing Harry Potter books to writing adult fiction. We also wondered if Rowling had been waiting to finally write a book that contains adult issues and uses language that is more suitable for adults.

If we had been councillors voting at the council meeting, we all would have voted to keep the Fields as part of Pagford, instead of reassigning them to Yarvil for the boundary review. We did wonder if Rowling chose to write this particular book, in order to encourage people to give the lower classes (and people that are generally on benefits) more of a chance and the benefit of the doubt.

We didn’t like the fact that Mary didn’t go to Krystal’s funeral (and thus also prevented her children from attending). We also didn’t particularly like Howard’s birthday party.

Our overall opinion of the book was that it was an interesting read, but it was also very left-wing.

What did you think of the book?