The Casual Vacancy
by
J.K. Rowling
read by
Tom Hollander
People have been funny about this book. Instead of being treated as the eighth book by Rowling, it has been more treated as her Sophomore effort. I've read several previews that are at their core, "she wrote Harry Potter, but can she capture the magic again" pun intended by them, I'm sure. They treated here like she had written one little book that had been mildly popular and wondered if she could live up to the bar she set for herself, modest as it was. This really pissed me off. She did write seven fantastic books, and let me remind you, as I'm positive that you already know, they were no thin tomes. I was fairly confident going into this book that it was going to be well written. It is a little ironic that the pretics (preview critics) were right about her setting the bar for the Casual Vacancy, they were just wrong at how high it was. If you're the author of the most beloved young adult series of all time, how amazing does your next book after finishing that series have to be to not be considered a failure? And does it have to be even a little more because it's not a YA book? The pressure, both internal and external, must have been nearly unbearable.
Do note that I said previews above and not reviews. I divided early on that I didn't want to know any spoilers about this story. I also didn't want to know if the critics that I occasionally to regularly read thought this book was brilliant or thought it was crap. It was enough to know that the book was 'Fiction' and was aimed at adults instead of young adults. I also knew from a very early interview that Rowling gave about this book that it had nothing to do with magic or wizarding and was set in a fictitious small town.
While I was able to keep away from print and radio reviews, I did hear people coming into the library and discussing the book. Fortunately, the remarks were generally along the lines of "I loved it" or "I hated it". There were two or three elaborations of the dislike that amounted to, "this is NOT Harry Potter", by which I assume that they meant not the lack of magic, but that this book dealt with more mature subjects and was not black and white.
I liked this book. No, more than that, I really liked this book. All of the characters were flawed and very human, often times painfully so. There were characters to despise, not because they were evil, but because they were selfish which manifested itself in several different ways depending upon the characters. But you develop empathy or sympathy, sometimes both for all of these most flawed characters. I found myself becoming emotionally invested in all of players in this story, cheering some and hissing at others. I love books that do this to me.
I'm not going to go into the plotting of the book as I feel to give a faithful synopsis would require pages and pages and then still leave out important things. You want to know what happened? Visit Wikipedia.
I listened to this book, so before starting not only was I wondering if the Casual Vacancy would stand up to the Potter books, I wondered how Tom Hollander would do compared to Jim Dale. I thought Hollander was a very good fit. By the middle of the first disk, I'm guessing, I had stopped thinking about this completely until writing about it now. That seems like a good thing to me. While I'm sure Dale would have done just as good of a job, it would have been weird to hear him utter phrases like, "You fucking bitch!" and "She's got a giant pair of mams." I know I'm being a little naive and selfish, but it's nice to have Jim Dale's voice associated with the Harry Potter books and not with this. The voice of the reader is so important to the mood and feeling of a story. It's nice to have two distinct mood/feelings for the Rowling books.
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