The Casual Vacancy [minor spoilers below]

I received J.K. Rowling's first "novel for grown-ups," The Casual Vacancy, for Christmas.  Last night, I finished it after deliberately spreading it out over several weeks.  This is, after all, J.K. Rowling, so sitting down to read one chapter inevitably turned into sitting down to read several.  But several was always enough, and I often let days go by before I picked the book up again.  I even made sure never to read before bed because I was scared of what my subconscious would do with the story while I slept.

It is impossible to write a book review about Rowling without mentioning the Harry Potter series, and yet it seemed to be her ambition in writing The Casual Vacancy to make any comparisons as difficult as humanly possible.  This new book is set in a drab, lifeless English town, which is filled with dark and selfish people, not a one of whom is particularly likable. 

The story opens with the death of a local councilman, Barry Fairbrother, and unfolds around the hole he left in the community - both the literal hole he left in local government and the figurative one he left in the lives of the story's many characters.  Through flashbacks, he is shown as perhaps the most respectable and earnest of the town's citizens, but he was hated as often as he was loved, and chaos descends without him.  (I've read several reviews of this book and haven't yet found any other mention of the coincidence of Rowling writing a story in which a [semi-]heroic figure named "Barry" encounters tragedy and subsequently serves as the focal point around which a war is fought, but surely I can't be the only reader who noticed...)

But Barry is merely a shadowy background character to the larger issues of the book.  The story is about those still alive - parents who put their own needs above their children's, children who torment their parents and each other, people with gross habits, obscene vocabularies, violent tendencies, and, above all, an endless obsession with the self that causes each and every one of them to harm themselves as well as those in their immediate (and not-so-immediate) vicinity.  There are graphic descriptions of abuse, of sex, of drug use, of rape, of self-harm, of self-loathing, and of death.  It is, in short, not a fun group of people to read about.

Well-written, difficult to read, I can't imagine any story that could more clearly separate Rowling from the Harry Potter world, and I feel this was probably something she needed to write for herself as an antithesis to all she had previously created.

As a fan of hers, though, it is my hope that she's gotten all of that out of her system now, and that the next book she writes offers a gentler and more hopeful view of human condition.