Chapter 3: Setting
a. Setting
b. Place names
Setting
The Casual Vacancy is set in a quaint village near a modern city in England, in the West Country, or southwest England. The village, Pagford, and the city, Yarvil, are both fictional.
Pagford is identified as a “parish.” This sounds like the name of a community around a church, and that is the history of the word, for sure. But local government in England today has several levels, and the smallest unit of local government is a “parish.” The town hall in Pagford is called the parish hall. The Parish Council is a governmental body, not a church body, concerned about taxes rather than tithes, about sewers rather than sinners, about street lamps rather than candles. The Chair of the Parish Council is also First Citizen, not Deacon.
The time is not specified, but is about 2011. Barry was born in the “late 1960s,” and died at the age of 44 (1967 + 44 = 2011). Fats and Krystal look at one of the “newer graves,” including one for a woman who died in March, 2008 (“Sleep Tight Mum”).
The time span is not exact, but it is about two months, from February to April, corresponding roughly to Lent. The final events are during Easter break, but it is not clear whether it is Holy Week or Easter week (or whether it matters).
Pagford is set amidst hills. There are three hills to the north, blocking the view of the city from the village. On the crown of one of the hills, Pargetter Hill, there are the ruins of an abbey, Pargetter Abbey. Hilltop House, where the Price family lives, is on the southern side of town, looking down on Pagford and then beyond it to the hills and the picturesque ruins. Pargetter Hill runs down, steeply at the bottom, to the muddy River Orr. The “thin river snaked around the edge of the hill and through town, straddled by a toy stone bridge” (p. 18).
An Anglican Church, St. Michael and All Saints, is in the center of the town, on or near the town square. The most expensive houses are along Church Row, running uphill from the church.
Beyond the hills to the north, but within the boundaries of the village (or “parish”), there is an estate once owned by the Sweetlove family, now owned by the Fawleys. The estate sold a parcel of land for the construction of a low-cost housing complex, the Fields.
The town square is picturesque. It has a stone cross, a war memorial. The Black Canon, one of England’s oldest pubs, is on one side of the square. Howard Mollison’s deli and new café are on the opposite side.
Most of the people in the parish work in Yarvil. There is an elementary school attached to the church in Pagford, but the closest secondary school is Winterdown Comprehensive School in Yarvil. In other words, Pagford is a suburb of Yarvil, whatever its history or pretensions.
Place names
The story is set in the “parish” of Pagford. A “parish” is the lowest tier of local government in England. The nation is divided into counties; counties are divided in districts; districts are divided into parishes. There are, of course, many exceptions to this simple pattern. The word “parish” sounds ecclesiastical. And indeed, the book explores a question of responsibility that lies in between the church and the state. The novel’s antagonist, Howard Mollison, is the Chair of the Pagford Parish Council. In the United States (outside Louisiana), that would almost always refer to a church function; but in this novel, he is like a mayor.
Rowling plays with names all through the Harry Potter series, and in this novel as well. “Pagford” is not the name of a real town in England; she invented it. “Pagus” is Latin for “village” or “town.”
The name Pagford brings Bedford Falls to mind. Bedford Falls is the setting for Frank Capra’s film, It’s a Wonderful Life. There are number of links in the book to Bedford Falls: the story of generosity versus selfishness, the collision of bankers, the abuse of housing for the poor, the angel who saves by falling in the river. In the Capra film, the generous banker sees a vision of the town without him: the nasty grasping banker takes over, and builds a slum called Pottersville. When Rowling was writing her novel, some people wondered if it would extend the Harry Potter world in some way. But the novel is not set in “Harry-Potter-ville.” Quite the opposite: it explores a world much more like Capra’s “Pottersville.”
The name Pagford may bring Mitford to mind. Novelist Jan Karon wrote a series of books about life in Mitford, focusing on the work of a parish priest, a vicar. Besides Bedford and Mitford, “Pagford” may also bring to mind pagans and pigs. (Maybe.)
To the north of Pagford, there is the city of Yarvil. That name too is a Rowling creation, not a real English city. The word “yare” is an archaic word, meaning easy to handle, or lively, used especially of ships that are easy to handle. The word shows up in the opening scene of Shakespeare’s Tempest: the boatswain shouts encouragement (or command to hustle?) to mariners during a storm. The name, then, might suggest traditional England, colorful and lively.
The main street in the parish is Church Row. It is a “steeply sloping street where the most expensive houses stood in all their Victorian extravagance and solidity (p. 7).” Three of the families in the story live on church: the Fairbrothers, the Mollisons (second generation), and the Jawandas.
The older Mollisons live just off Church Row, on Evergreen Crescent. This may be a quiet joke. The crescent moon is, of course, a symbol of Islam (in Western eyes, anyway – the symbol may be from the Ottoman Empire, which Western Europeans but not all Muslims understood to be the heart of Islam) ; and the color green is also associated with Islam. Shirley Mollison is a nasty character, angrily defensive of Christian culture, although she is ignorant of its practice. At one point in the story, she hears the bells ringing at the church at the bottom of Church Row, and she hopes that the bells bother the Jawandas. She is disturbed that the Jawanda family, who are Sikhs, not Christians, now live in old Vicarage near the church. Shirley, who is not well educated, does not know the difference between Sikhs and Hindus and Muslims, and she is contemptuous of the Jawandas for being whatever-it-is. It is plausible that Rowling was poking fun at Shirley when she put this ignorant and bigoted character on Evergreen Crescent.
Hope Street – “short, shabby little Hope Street” (21) – is not as prestigious or solid as Church Row, with its two lines of small terraced houses; it has homes of hard-working people. Howard Mollison grew up there, but left it behind. Nana Cath Weedon lives there, and sometimes provides an anchor for numerous troubled descendants, including Krystal. Kay Bawden, another positive figure in Krystal’s life, also lives there.
Three hills divide the town from the city. The ruins of a monastery are atop one of the hills. Krystal Weedon points the abbey out to her little brother, calling it a castle – a revealing error. Although there are several references to people looking at the monastery, there is only one slight hint of anyone having any interest in visiting them: fats Wall and Andrew Price found a small cave in the riverbank, and wondered briefly if it had a tunnel up the hill to the abbey. The abbey is named Pargetter Abbey; it sits on Pargetter Hill. The name is odd for an abbey; there is no Saint Pargetter. Rowling may have named her abbey for Edith Pargeter, who wrote a series of wonderful murder mysteries, the Brother Cadfael series, using the nom de plume Ellis Peters. The series is set in and around the abbey in Shrewsbury in the 13th century. The neglected abbey is the most visible detail of a pattern in the novel: there are many reminders of the Church’s role in ages past, but the Church in Pagford is moribund. One possible interpretation of the novel focuses on the dead Church as the fundamental “vacancy” in the novel.
South of the village, the Price family lives on a hill with an excellent view of the town and abbey ruins. Their home is called Hilltop House.
The town sits by a river, the River Orr. The river, like water in general, may be a symbol for life and/or death. Life: Barry teaches Krystal to manage life, by teaching her row. When she sees the river without Barry, the light reflected off it dazzles her, and she can’t look at it. Death: Robbie drowns in the Orr. Resurrection: Sukhvinder comes out of the river physically hurt, but emotionally and socially and spiritually renewed.
The drowning incident is a time of decision for many characters, but especially for three – Shirley, Samantha, and Gavin – who see Robbie running around in panic before he falls in the river. Will they help … ORR … not? Shirley defends herself when she tells a friend that she saw Robbie and didn’t help; she refuses to take responsibility for what she didn’t do. Samantha is deeply shaken by her failure to help, and this is the turning point in her life. Gavin sees Robbie but doesn’t act, and then forgets promptly; in general, he will not make decisions, and when he feels pressed to make a decision, he resents it.
Over the hills away from the village, but still between the village and the city, there is an estate that belonged for many years to the Sweetlove family. The Sweetloves were patrons of the village for generations, and the parish hall has the Sweetlove crest over the door. But after the time remembered as idyllic, under Sweetlove patronage, came the Fawleys. Aubrey Fawley bought the estate, and sold some of fields – still called simply “the Fields” – to Yarvil for a housing development. Some residents of the village felt they had been betrayed, and resented the sale for decades. Barry Fairbrother grew up in the Fields, then went on to prosper, but never forgot his roots.
It is plausible that the Krystal’s name and the name of the development, the Fields, are allusions to a pair of images in the Gospel according to St. Matthew, in which Jesus says: “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field, which a person finds and hides again, and out of joy goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant searching for fine pearls. When he finds a pearl of great price, he goes and sells all that he has and buys it.” The question about the Fields is whether there is any value there; Barry Fairbrother devotes much of his life to the treasure he finds in the Fields. The treasure he focuses on is not a pearl, but a Krystal.
Other place names that recall the Christian history of the town include the Anglican school in Pagford, St. Thomas Elementary School; the school in Yarville where the rowing teams triumphs, St. Anne; the Bellchapel Addiction; the church where the funerals took place at the beginning and end of the book, St. Michael and All the Saints; and the Old Vicarage near the church, where the Sikh family, the Jawandas, now live.
Gavin lives a few miles outside the village, in a cottage called the Smithy.
Terri Weedon and her children Krystal and Robbie live in the Fields, on Foley Road.
Given the rich and humorous use of allusions in Rowling’s books, it would be foolish to assert firmly that some names are just place names and no more. So: I do not see allusions in all the names.
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