A Vacancy of Plot

I'm generally reluctant to give up on reading a book without finishing it, and I was stinging a bit from having done exactly that recently (with the starts-promising-but-aimlessly-meandering Kraken). And yet I found myself compelled to do so again when I found myself grappling with J.K. Rowling's newest effort, The Casual Vacancy.

When the author of the Harry Potter series first declared she was writing another book, I was thrilled. I enjoyed her books enough that I didn't want to regard her as a lucky flash-in-the-pan novice. A true author, I reasoned, wouldn't hang up her hat after one successful series, but would feel compelled to keep writing and publishing. When Rowling announced her book would be adult fiction, I was even more intrigued. She really was a writer, it seemed, who was leveraging her success to follow her own muse. She not only resisted the compulsion to follow up with something her fans would like, she decided to write something many of her fans would be too young to reasonably read.

But I never imagined she'd publish a book that was essentially unreadable, period.

The Casual Vacancy is a novel set in a fictitious rural town in England. After the death of a local level politician... stuff doesn't happen. That's as close as I can get to a synopsis. Things seemed to be brewing for a political contest to fill his empty council seat, and determine whether the town would remain independent or be incorporated into a nearby larger town. But after reading fully a third of the book, all there was was an avalanche of characters.

The book has over a dozen significant characters, most with sections told from their perspective, all with their own day-to-day minutia that didn't seem to fit into any kind of larger narrative. Children, foreigners, power-hungry figures, wives, mistresses, social workers... on and on and on, like a George R.R. Martin novel without the interesting parts or jaw-dropping plot developments.

But certainly with all the swearing. Rowling lets the first f-bomb fly around page 14, and from there there's no letting up. Rowling has said in interviews that she felt motivated to write about the lower-class world she knew growing up, but the book reads like she was simply trying to use every bit of profanity she couldn't include in seven children's books all in one novel. Harry Potter gave her literary Tourette's.

I kept trying and trying to plow through the book, as the occasional clever turn of phrase had me convinced that J.K. Rowling's clever writing style was still intact despite the boring subject matter. But ultimately, I just couldn't force myself to slog through any more. I simply have no patience for character studies without a narrative.

This being essentially just one bad book after a string of seven very good ones, I'm not about to proclaim J.K. Rowling a one-hit wonder. Nor am I even going to call for her to return to the young adult world with her next effort. But I am going to approach that effort, whenever it comes, with a lot more caution. The Casual Vacancy was an absolute mess that should be avoided, no matter how much you think might like it. (Or might want to.)