Here’s Fats skipping school - he wears his uniform “with the disdain of a convict” - and thinking about his life and his obsession with what he calls authenticity: Having read all 4,000-and-whatever pages of the Harry Potter series, I thought I’d heard most of what Rowling had to say about the inner workings of teenage boys. It’s as if Rowling were an animagus, except that instead of turning into a stag or a dog or whatever, she transformed into Ian McEwan.īefore I get into the plot of The Casual Vacancy I want to call out one character in particular, a sardonic, smart-mouthed schoolboy known as Fats, because he’s an instructive point of comparison. This is a deeply moving book by somebody who understands both human beings and novels very, very well. It’s a big, ambitious, brilliant, profane, funny, very upsetting and magnificently eloquent novel of contemporary England, rich with literary intelligence and entirely bereft of bullshit, and if it weren’t for Rowling’s stringent security measures, it would or at least should have contended for the Booker Prize. And that’s not even a very good example.īut The Casual Vacancy is a different beast entirely. Eliot writing both The Waste Landand also Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. The most successful example I can think of is T.S. All the available evidence suggests that it’s simply a different kind of talent. Not even Roald Dahl could switch-hit, and not for lack of trying. A lot of young-adult authors, great ones, have tried their hands at literary fiction, and not a lot of them have succeeded. I also know enough literary sabermetrics to be aware that the odds of the book’s being good were not short. I have spent many, many hours reading J.K. 22 I work for the military-industrial-entertainment complex, let’s just leave it at that). I know I had a lot of, let’s call them feelings when I opened the book (which happened on Sept.

There’s no point pretending they’re not there. It’s not really possible to open The Casual Vacancy without a lot of expectations both high and low crashing around in your brain and distorting your vision.

The casual vacancy kindle