To declare possible bias first: I have
never read any of her Harry Potter books
simply because this genre doesn’t interest me at my advanced age. When I was a
teenager in Germany, I devoured Karl May’s Wild West and Oriental adventure
books, some 20 volumes in all. Our son was a great fan of Raymond E. Feist’s
fantasy fiction and no doubt was instrumental in what authors like Rowling, May
and Feist do so well, namely to instil a capacity if not love for reading in
young people. Reading large amounts of text, fictional or non-fictional,
invariably leads to an extensive knowledge base, to literary refinement and
aids the development of one’s own writing skills. Of course some of us harbour
the dream that, like J.K. Rowling, our manuscript(s) will be accepted by a
major publisher and henceforth sell millions of our books, to be turned into
blockbuster movies and commercial accessories, and to become super rich and
famous like J.K. My personal connection goes as far as having been an ESOL
teacher for some time, just like J.K. in her youth teaching ESOL in Portugal –
me in Asia and the Middle East - all the while making notes on Harry Potter, while over the years I
only managed to have a couple of academic treatises (one on Noam Chomsky)
published – and my novella lingering undiscovered as a self-publication with
Lulu.com. Naturally as an average news and literature junkie I have
occasionally followed J.K’s progress and when news reached the world that she
was writing an ‘adult’ novel, I was intrigued enough to check out what the fuss
was all about. When the launch became a major media event, I saw an interview
clip on the Guardian website where she amicably chatted with a journalist
dressed up as a literary agent for cook books. My wife who monitors my media
interests jumped the gun and bought a hardcopy of The Casual Vacancy, a week or so after the launch. Having by then
already learnt about the plot and what the major media literary critics thought
of the book – mainly OK but not high-brow literature – I was of course
wondering if my reading of it would concur with the initial reviews. (I will
first present my review independent of any references to any other reviews and
only then make some comparative comments).
Having had only time to read the book on my
way to and from work (sadly still teaching ESOL) – on a ferry – it took quite a
while to get through; however, it was always with anticipation as to what would
happen next. A good sign! The main characters and their families were quickly
established and the drama, if not the tragedy, unfolded, with some clever
backwards and forwards narrative, in the contemporary timeline of a small
British town, thinly disguised as fictional, for what was unfolding is in essence
a grim social realism prevalent in Britain as much as in the Western World
generally. Rowling describes the whole strata of contemporary society in no
uncertain terms, from the local grandee cum
London banker down to the junkie mother and her two children, teenager
Krystal and toddler Robbie living in a dingy council flat at the border of
Pagford (the fictional name of the town). Krystal Weedon, as the other high
school teenagers in the play – I say ‘play’ both because the novel has
Shakespearean qualities as well as being a good script for a movie – Stuart
‘Fats’ Wall, Andrew Price, Sukhvinder Jawanda and Gaia Bawden (and few lesser
ones) are really the heart of the novel and as such eminently suitable for
reading material for young adults, if indeed not adolescents at High School.
Given that there is quite a lot of teenage
sex involved – not to speak of the sex between some of the adults, and most
notoriously the rape of Krystal by her mother’s drug supplier – there is of
course the immediate question of the novel’s suitability for youngsters below a
certain age. This conundrum of the ‘suitable age’ has always been hotly debated
as if adolescents have to be protected from the depraved aspects of sex, be it
rape or paedophilia (as a nightmare scenario for Fat’s father ‘Cubby’, the
deputy principal of the local high school) by not talking or reading about it.
After all modern schools have ‘sex education’ on their curriculum, albeit in
the most sanitized version of sex being a biological act that is best accompanied
by genuine love – the latter a nebulous term for many a teenager – so Rowling’s
treatment of sex as social reality must come with its teenage angst and most of
all with its crude language. Maybe there is something innately British about
the term ‘shagging’ which is used frequently as an intermediate term somewhere
between ‘fuck’ and ‘have sex’ and ‘make love’. When Fats ‘shags’ Krystal one
does get the impression – as a non-British speaker of English – that the act is
something akin to coming under friendly fire.
Another term used as pre-eminently British,
is ‘slapper’ which is of interest to New Zealand readers inasmuch the term
surfaced as a highly unusual epithet in a recent murder case whereby the
accused had scrawled the word on a wall, denouncing his brother-in-law’s wife
as such and standing accused of murdering his brother-in-law. People had to
consult their dictionaries to determine the meaning of ‘slapper’.
In any case the heavy dose of graphic sex,
amongst teenagers and adults, running the gambit from rape to ‘making love’ is
of course questionable. Sure, nobody can deny that it isn’t happening,
especially the low-down abuse of sex as violence but is it the domain of
literature as we’d like to know it? How much of it is voyeurism that attracts
readers with unstable minds – yes, even readers and writers are not immune from
insane acts like rape – and how much is it gritty realism, designed to forewarn
the reader of the awful consequences of
depraved sex, like the rape of Krystal ultimately contributing to her
suicide. In this The Casual Vacancy
is very similar to a notorious New Zealand novel called Once were Warriors (by Alan Duff) which was made into a grim movie
detailing the low-down Maori gang culture, also resulting in a teenage girl’s
suicide due to rape by a relative. Some people saw it as a powerful tale to
make people aware of the dreadful consequences of a macho culture that regaled
in mindless violence, while others denounced it as voyeurism that invited sick
minds to watch a simulated rape scene. Whilst the Once were Warriors novel could be critiqued as presenting perversity and
violence – with doses of relatively harmless sex, drugs and rock’n’roll – as
being inherently low-class Maori, without considering the societal conditions
which drive sections of society into underground squalor and misery – with
attendant crime and violence – the same cannot then be said of The casual Vacancy precisely because
Rowling presents the whole picture, and in no uncertain terms blames the British
middle and upper classes for what goes on in the down-and-out sections of
Pagford.
The prime vehicle is the Mollison family: Howard as the obese, ageing
businessman and Pagford councillor, his weird wife Shirley who worships the
local grandee and the Queen, their lawyer son Miles who plays the theme of ‘as
father as son’ and who unfortunately married a class down to a buxom blonde who
causes much consternation for her mother-in-law Shirley. The senior Mollisons
also have a lesbian daughter who has been sidelined but occasionally surfaces
as a minor character – in my opinion as a bit of a cliché and as a flaw in
Rowling’s overall attempt to cram in all the middleclass scenarios known to
British mankind. Howard represents the silent majority of ‘decent’ burghers who
just want the problem of low class people to go away – literally. Out of sight
out of mind. Helping low class people like Terri (Krystal’s junkie mother) to
get out of their squalid condition, is written off as pointless, as these
people have only themselves to blame. It is their choice to take drugs and rape
each other. Just don’t do it in our backyard. One might think that this is a
cliché not worthy of the middle classes who after all just do the bidding of
the upper classes – the Fawleys in the novel – but this is exactly the strength
of the argument in The casual Vacancy, namely
the denunciation of the upper and middle classes together, as perpetrators of
social disintegration for those on the low and lowest socio-economic ladder.
Without the help of the bourgeoisie the ruling class cannot function as a model
of the Westminster Parliamentary system (read: constitutional monarchy): they
would have to revert to feudal absolutism (read: monarchy).
The other central character in the novel,
Barry Fairbrother (sometimes Rowling is a bit clichéd with her choice of names,
as if the name itself indicates as to who we are) is of course already dead at
the beginning of the novel and plays his role mainly as the
‘ghost-of-Barry-Fairbrother’ (for his life, we are filled in by various
flashback scenes). He took on the role of lower-class man made good through
education, having been brought up in the low-class council flats of the Fields
within the border of Pagford, and having made it through university (the first
in his family) and become the local banker (he presumably being a ‘good’ banker
as opposed to the local aristocrat who is the ‘bad’ London banker). In any case
Barry takes Krystal under his wings and just about transforms the troublesome
teenager into a champion rower – the sort of saga whereby athletic talent
exhibited unexpectedly by the lower classes is seen as the bootstrap by which
you can pull yourself up into the big league. Gaia, as the alternative teenage
character, just arrived from London with her social worker mother, has or had
after all a boyfriend who already was training for the British football league,
Chelsea maybe. In any case Krystal, as an unlikely rowing champion with a team
of others from the local high school, winning a match against the snobby
private school in the area, is a highlight of the sporting kind. Rowling’s
descriptive powers and sense of irony work best in such scenes. Kay, Gaia’s
mother, as the social worker fresh from London in pursuit of a gutless lover (a
lawyer called Gavin), is the only other really sympathetic character in the
book, meaning ‘sympathetic’ as a social worker who takes her job seriously and
treats Terri quite successfully to the degree that Terri gives up heroin, at
least for a while, and looks after her toddler son Robbie better than before.
Redemption is possible with the genuine help of those who see the worth in each
individual – a powerful message delivered by Rowling, quite possibly echoing
her own situation when she was a young solo-mother on welfare in Edinburgh,
poor but never down-and-out.
Which brings us to the other flawed family,
the Sikh Jawanda family, where the mother Parminder is the local GP, and her
husband, the good looking Vikram playing the surgeon in the district hospital.
Parminder as a fellow councillor (together with Howard, Barry and a few others)
is an admirer of Barry, inasmuch as he seemed to do what others only preach,
like her Guru’s saying of ‘the light of God shines from every soul’. Parminder
hates Howard for his insipid racism against her family, even though it is the
son of the deputy principal, Fats, who torments their daughter Sukhvinder with
primitive racial and sexual taunts. Howard’s on the other hand is the wholesome
racism of the British race which has a noble and long history wedded to a place
like Pagford and no immigrants – especially of colour - can possibly usurp this
legacy and tradition, no matter how qualified they are and how well-off they
are. There is even some ambivalence in Rowling’s apparent attitude, as she
paints Parminder in particular as a somewhat unstable character who is obsessed
with a personal hatred of Howard, so much so that she commits a professional
indiscretion by publicly admonishing Howard as a cost to the British health system,
due to his gross obesity. Of course she is right but in polite society one
cannot say so – and there is no doubt that J.K. is now also a member of the
polite society.
Which brings us in turn to the interesting
question as to why Rowling wrote the book in the first place. Had she written
it as her first effort, she would not have found a major publisher for it.
After all the publishing industry has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo for British and world
society. Having reached the pinnacle of publishing success with her Harry Potter books, she could dictate
the ‘next’ book whatever its theme. Maybe she wanted to give the fingers to all
those middle and upper class twats who ignored her so cruelly when she was a
young and very good writer of fiction – just because she didn’t belong to the
right class of Oxbridge people who publish successful books. I would do the
same if I had the chance – or so I keep telling myself. There is something very
incongruous in having her mug shot at the back of the book jacket, looking ever
so glamorous, looking so totally disconnected from the book she just wrote.
Presumably aged 47 in the photograph, she exhibits a cleavage she decries so
humorously as ‘cracked’ in The Casual
Vacancy for elderly women. Of course she can now afford the very best the
beauty industry has on offer and she will look forever young and beautiful,
cleavage and all. Can Rowling be a social activist? A recent report from the
British Commission on Living Standards says that ‘Britain faces a choice
between a generation of stagnant living standards for millions of lower-income
households, or an alternative that tackles low pay, low skills, and childcare
costs’; so, can Rowling be an influential advocate for the ‘alternative’? Will
Britain descend to Dickensian conditions and is Rowling the new Dickens?
Dickens famously campaigned for children’s rights in many of his novels, and
Rowling in The Casual Vacancy can be
compared to this noble aim. She obviously has a knack to describe the lives of
dispossessed children and adolescents and make us painfully aware that the
children – like Robbie and Krystal – are the ones who pay the price with their
lives.
Maybe Rowling has the hope that a new
generation, spawned by the working and middle classes, can become the new and
follow-up rebels of the 60s generation, in open conflict with their miserable
parents’ generation. Unfortunately she focuses too much on generational
differences that stem from idiosyncratic conditions rather than universal
themes (e.g. make love not war) – only Fats is described as having some
philosophical thoughts, like wanting to be ‘authentic’.
As such, the theme in The Casual Vacancy as a conflict of generations, is somewhat
overdone. All the teenage characters are in conflict with their parents, one
way or the other. Andrew Price gets regularly beaten up by this dumb working
class dad who is given to mindless violence as much as being mindless
generally. His wife gets the occasional fist as well. Rowling sometimes uses the
word ‘pummelling’ as if she wants to downplay the physical family violence as
not that bad, contrasting it with the far worse psychological violence visited
upon Fats by his psychotic father, the deputy principal who imagines himself as
a paedophile in disguise, and the somewhat clichéd terror of the strict
traditional Sikh family values which demand educational success from their
offspring at all costs. The unfortunate youngest daughter is therefore given to
self-harm.
Then there is the verbal violence – if
that’s what it is - played out between Krystal and her mother. As opposed to
the other teenage-parent relationships, Krystal is the real mother figure (and
in the end tragically wanting to become a mother herself) doing her best to
save her mother from heroin induced oblivion. There is a bit of the 70s iconic
‘teach your parents well’ song lyric in all of this, as well as the age old
observation that in very poor societies the young look after the old (and not
so old).So why in this Orwellian down-and-out scenario do we have this low-down
language to contend with? Many a sociolinguist has grappled with this question which pains the polite middle classes in
particular. Maybe poverty breeds not only crime but also a language dialect
that bestows an unmistakable identity, a kind of verbal revenge visited upon
polite society.
Rowling’s use of the vernacular, like the
drug dealer’s request for Terri to keep some goods stashed away ‘Jus’ keep ‘em
‘ere fer us, Ter, fer a coupla days?’, or like Krystal’s vernacular anguish
when she finds out her mother is shooting up again ‘You stupid fuckin’ junkie
bitch, they’ll kick yer ou’ the fuckin’ clinic again’ - this sounds slightly
laboured inasmuch all the other characters’ dialogue is rendered in
conventional spelling form. To have sections of dialogue (or thoughts) in the
vernacular for the down-and-out but not for all the others is a problem for
social realism, inasmuch all people of all classes have sociolects, be it the
Queen or be it the Terri, the junkie. As we know, the conventional written word
is an abstraction of the spoken word, and as such cannot render the true spirit
of a dialogue unless we employ phonetic script or other devices such as the
liberal use of the apostrophe to indicate dropped consonants and vowels. Of
course Rowling wants to demonstrate that so-called bad and/or obscene language
as a dialect of certain sub-cultures is as neutral as BBC English is for the
daily news. The well-known sociolinguist William Labov in his (1972) Language in the Inner City portrays
black American inner city vernacular as a perfectly formed language dialect,
transcribing recorded text with normal spelling (e.g. ‘Well, you must can’t
fuck good then.’) but of course also detailing the particular prosody that goes
with it in a separate chapter. Rowling could have adopted a similar scheme,
thereby also being able to poke some fun at the affected accents the middle
classes often adopt (à la Mrs Bucket in the old BBC comedy series).
As mentioned above, Krystal is the only ‘young’
character who, from the beginning, tries to looks after the ‘old’, i.e. her
mother Terri, thereby alerting us to the role reversal that is necessary for
any generational conflict to resolve itself. Rowling indicates something like
that also for the Sikh family in that their youngest daughter changes from a
Cinderella character into an assertive young woman who tells her mother what is
what. Perhaps Rowling is pessimistic about wholesale generational change as the
other teenage protagonists don’t seem to progress, stuck in teenage angst and
sexual inadequacy.
I’ll resist the ‘how many points out of 10’
to give the novel, and instead check out what some of the mainstream reviewers
have to say, and how much I agree or disagree. Much of the semi-intelligent
British media is dominated by the Guardian empire these days – what with the
BBC rapidly falling into everlasting disgrace over the Savile scandal – so the
review by the Guardian’s Theo Tait must come first, giving a cautious thumbs up
with various misgivings:
But if The
Casual Vacancy is ambitious in its scope and themes, it is determinedly
unadventurous in its style and mode. It's a book that wrestles honourably and
intelligently with big moral and political questions, but does so in a slightly
clunky and convention-bound way.
In other words it sounds a bit boring.
Wrestling with ‘political questions’ should best be left to the Guardian, it
seems. A clearly disingenuous ruse to keep readers away from anything
approaching social realism. One item of agreement lies in the reviewer’s
observation of the use of the vernacular:
Perhaps that's
partly because the Fields characters are handled with the tweezers of
old-fashioned literary convention: whereas the others speak in rounded standard
English, they use a kind of generalised, Dickensian lower-order-speak, that
owes more to written convention than anything real: "I takes Robbie to the
nurs'ry"; "Tha's norra fuckin' crime"; "No, shurrup,
righ'?" (ibid.)
So what do the mighty say across the mighty
Atlantic? The New York Times – in a recent NZ National Radio talk show
identified as the best newspaper in the world, or thereabouts – as a
counterpart to the Guardian is, perhaps not surprisingly, saying much the same,
like it’s good but on the whole you don’t have to read it. At least the NYT
reviewer Amanda Foreman opens with some compliments:
“The Casual
Vacancy,” Rowling’s much-anticipated departure from the genre of children’s
fantasy, is a sprawling homage to the Victorian protest novel as typified by
Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell and Thomas Hardy. Like them, Rowling
wishes to engage and enrage her readers, inspiring them to take socially
conscious action.
While everyone seems to agree that Dickens was
influential in highlighting Victorian degradation, and bringing about some
social change for the better, both the Guardian and the NYT don’t want to accord
any such possibility to Rowling, mainly because this is where the media calls
the shots and ‘manufactures consent’ ( à la Chomsky and Herman). The NYT
readers are warned that
Rowling has
always harbored a particular loathing for middle-class smugness and
self-congratulation — the kind Dickens so effectively satirized in “Oliver
Twist … The unattractive sneer at middlebrow taste could have been toned down
too. Few, if any, will share Rowling’s notion that a weakness for royal-themed
tchotchkes and chenille robes is a sign of moral turpitude. (ibid.)
One also detects here the warning that
Rowling seems to attack sacrosanct authorities like the ‘royals’ and as such
cannot be tolerated as a social reformer, unlike good old Dickens (who never
seemed to criticise Queen Victoria). Anyway, I must be one of the ‘few, if any;
that share Rowling’s notion. The NYT in the end delivers the coup de grace:
A thoughtful
edit might have removed many of the stylistic slippages that mar “The Casual
Vacancy.” Rowling is at the height of her creative powers: there might have
been a good, possibly even great, 300-page social novel inside the 500-page
tear-jerker we have instead. Let’s hope it will be different next time.
(ibid.)
Subtext: write more Harry Potter novels and don’t meddle with the powers-to-be. Of
course the NYT had also presented an earlier review, by one Michiko Kakutani,
which totally rubbished the novel.
So what about a review from a bit on the
left side? One cannot find them as easily as the ones from the right wing –
naturally (as search engines deliver the conservative diet ad nauseam). One from a Yale (sic)
college kid who is a bit of a lefty:
This is a book
about class. The central battle of the book is one over the merits of
government intervention and the meaning of responsibility — the battle between
rich and poor, the haves and the have-nots. Rowling, who once described herself
as being as “poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain without being
homeless,” is exposing her readers to the miseries of poverty that they never saw
even in a cupboard bedroom or second-hand wands. She is arguing powerfully for
the responsibility we have to help the least among us. There is no magic spell
to cure heroin addicts or uplift downtrodden children, and Rowling does not
sugarcoat. This will not be a book with a happy ending. Yet it is an important
one, from perhaps the world’s most important living author.
The kid writes very badly but at least
honestly. If we were to apply a Marxist analysis, or something along the lines
that it is a crime to own assets and wealth, which adds up to more than ten
times the average wage of the workers, we would have to dismiss Rowling as a
criminal, never mind her insipid analysis of the class struggle. Revolution
cannot come from above as ‘government intervention’. However, since
contemporary society has regressed to the point where ‘revolution’ is a
cosmetics brand, one cannot be surprised that the reactionaries view Rowling as
a real threat to the Tories:
I do not agree
with the claim that this book is a "500 page long Socialist
manifesto" masquerading as a novel. It's much too negative and depressing
to be a manifesto of any kind.
Obviously Rowling is no revolutionary,
after all it is reported that she donated a million Pounds to the Labour Party.
How could she?
Perhaps there is a deep irony in that
Rowling’s erstwhile success with the Harry
Potter books is rooted in a neo-feudal magic mysticism – of the nicest kind
of course – which was ordained by the ruling classes as suitable reading
material for youngsters (unlike the young, 10-year old, Noam Chomsky reading
socialist pamphlets and copies of the
Freie Arbeiterstimme) but when she turned to writing in a mildly social
realist mode in The Casual Vacancy, she
must be stopped in her tracks, especially as her younger readership might be
tempted to read it too. Doesn’t she know that richesse oblige? Imagine if Karl May had written Das Kapital as a postlude to his magic
adventure stories! So, compared to Karl May, who never quite escaped his
fantastic imaginations (he did however become a pacifist in his later years),
J.K. Rowling did reasonably well.
