critical companion - intro

Dear Beth,

You really should read The Casual Vacancy!  I am startled by the reviews I have seen, grumbling that it is okay but not great – that J. K. Rowling produced the children’s story of the century but cannot write durable adult fiction.  These reviewers need a little help understanding the book.  I think it is much stronger than the Harry Potter series.  It is not a simple delight, like the first few Potter books; it is a little grim.  But it is a great book, truly great.  To explain what I see in the book, I find myself reaching for insights from Solzhenitsyn, Dante, Dickens, Tolstoi, Frank Capra, the Inklings Lewis and Tolkien, Scripture, the history of the Church in England – and, for sure, the author of the Potter series.

For some reason, reviewers are overlooking the Potter connection, accepting at face value Rowling’s assertion that this book is not about Harry Potter.  It seems to me that the way into the book is to start with Harry Potter, but note the large differences: there are no witches or wizards or wands, the school in it is not Hogwarts, and Harry Potter dies on page 3.  Those are not small differences, not “casual vacancies.”

On the other hand, the protagonist in the new novel is the same.  The protagonist is Barry Fairbrother.  Harry/Barry Potter/Brother: this is the same name, let alone the same courage, the same self-sacrificial love, the same instincts.  Barry is the fairy godfather, or fairy god-brother, or a fair and realistic representation of the people who gave rise to stories about fairy godparents.  Harry Potter’s task was to save the world; Barry’s task is less lofty, more human – and more interesting: to give a hand to some neighbors in a bad section of town, especially Krystal Weedon.

In the book, we hear children playing with Krystal’s last name: pee-ed upon.  And her reaction to the cruel games with her name is an early revelation of her character: she laughs, and joins in.  The reason she laughs is captured in her first name, which is not explored explicitly: she is the diamond in the rough, the gem that makes life worth the struggle.  She is the “pearl of great price.”  To pound that home – that she is the pearl of great price – she is from the Fields.  The story about selling everything in order to buy a field because there is a treasure buried there is a re-working of the story about the pearl of great price.

Would a popular author on the 21st century dare to allude to Scripture in this way?  Such use of allegorical language is medieval – or at any rate very old, like John Bunyan in Pilgrim’s Progress – which was a great success when it came out (334 years ago).  Would Rowling use the same antiquated approach?  Apparently yes.  The Inklings pulled it off – in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia and science fiction trilogy, and in Owen Barfield’s collection of hybrids.  And so does she.  It’s not just the names of the hero and the child he tries to save; the homes of key characters are on Hope Street and Church Row.  The dominant image in the village is the ruined abbey on the skyline.  The book is bracketed by events in the Church of St. Michael and all the Saints, starting off with Barry’s funeral and closing with Krystal’s.  For better or worse, this novel scratches its head about God, non-stop.

The Inklings described their work as “pre-evangelization” – or, at least, others around them described their work that way.  That is, they set out to raise questions about reality that others could answer later.  The answers to questions that a person isn’t asking cannot be interesting; prodding someone’s imagination to raise serious questions must precede answering these questions.  Beth, I could well be wrong about this, but I think that Rowling has deliberately assumed the mantle of the Inklings, and is carrying on their work.

Many reviewers understood that Rowling’s novel is not set at Hogwarts, but complained that the characters in the town of Pagford are superficial and sordid, gossiping about trivia.  This is a colossal misapprehension.  The novel is more Dante’s Inferno than Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place.  That is, some of them are sordid, but they are definitely not superficial.  The characters are indeed flawed, but they are flawed in a fascinating variety of ways.  For each character, you can ask, “Why won’t this person help Krystal and the Fields?”  Some are not interested; others are willing, but not able.  But the vacancies (casual or otherwise) in their lives are not the same; their shortcomings are as varying and as interesting as Dante’s sins. 

The novel does not end in disaster.  It is more like George Eliot’s novels, which do not end with the superficial and obvious happiness of Austen’s novels, but do end happily – after re-defining and toughening up the concept of happiness.  The novel explores the lives of about 24 people in seven families.  Most of them end up satisfactorily.  But the most interesting development is in the Jawanda family – the outsiders, the dark-skinned Sikhs, the only characters who have an articulate spiritual life.  The ugly duckling in the family, Sukhvinder, is disappointed by the absence of a proper eulogy at her friend’s funeral; the vicar does not know anything good about the dead, and this vacancy is profoundly hurtful, a final insult to Wee’d-on Krystal.  Sukhvinder thinks about what should be said, and her eulogy is stunningly powerful, although unspoken. 

Beth, this is a great novel.  The ideas she explores are powerful; the diverse characters are worth abundant scrutiny; the plot is startlingly gripping, given the picturesque setting.  Get it, and settle down to read it slowly, to savor it – repeatedly.