Ray Soleil, laid up as he is with a broken arm, managed to send me the link to someone’s blogpost about Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, and their flat at Kensington Palace. I lacked the fortitude to read more about this newsy couple, he the most dashing of the royals and she much too pretty to be one, but I did learn that some of the smaller apartments in the palace are let to “suitable” tenants. There’s an Alan Bennett play in there somewhere! For some reason, the piece also put me in mind of the Duchess of Cambridge’s uncle Gary, not that I know anything about him except that his house in Ibiza is called the Maison de la Bang Bang. It doesn’t get less royal than that, innit?

Gary Goldsmith sounds like promising material for a JK Rowling novel, although I can only say that now that I’ve read the one, The Casual Vacancy. At lunch, a friend was telling me that she had been unable to get far into this book, which came out last year and did not do very well, not here in the United States, anyway. My friend thought that she might have let too much time elapse between readings, making it difficult to keep track of the characters, of whom there are about a dozen principal ones — characters to whose thoughts and feelings we’re made privy to. I could think of other reasons why the book might have been hard to get into. The setting is very English; it amounts to a cliché about antagonism between the conservative and comfortable inhabitants of an Olde English village and the sprawling impertinence of an adjacent municipality. But this picture begins to fall apart right away, with the death (by aneurysm) of a village councilor. It turns out that the council is divided (if unevenly) about a very important local issue, and the unexpected death, which creates the vacancy of the title (in which “casual” means something like “casualty”), knocks the blocks from under the status quo. What promises to be a darkish comedy of bad manners, though, gradually reveals itself to be something else, something more volatile and dangerous, as the antagonisms among the villagers induce them to act with a recklessness that we don’t associate with novels that open so picturesquely. You know that somebody is going to get hurt, and badly.

The pleasures of the English novel are all here — the sharply-drawn characters and the indefinite precision of their speech — but the moral of the story, which Rowling holds at bay with the spare elegance of her prose, is harsh: the people who get hurt are the ones without resources. Disaster might menace the prosperous (sometimes invited by irresponsible diet), but the prosperous have cushions to fall back upon. And they know how things work. They know what they’re doing, even when they’re being rash. (That’s what makes their foolishness feel dangerous.) The young and the disadvantaged are more at risk, just as in real life. Rowling is a great storyteller, capable of engineering a plot, with many moving, interactive parts, that comes to a dramatically satisfying conclusion. But this ending is very bleak. It encapsulates the proposition that only the dead have stories that end.

This is ironic, because most of Rowling’s characters are driven by the desire to restrain others. Village life, a competitive, zero-sum game, is replete with negative satisfactions: anyone’s loss is someone else’s gain. As the novel rolls along, you realize that the death at the beginning has gravely reduced the amount of generosity in circulation. The late councilor appears to have been the only person in town with a genuine interest in furthering the lives of others. It is not hard to see The Casual Vacancy as a scathing indictment, as they used to say, of provincial English life. It doesn’t read like one at all, but it closes like one. The affluent characters fumble their way onto less precarious ground. Beneath the others, the ground gives way.

It is no surprise that Rowling creates adolescent characters who are as vivid as her grown-up ones, but I can’t recall a novel in which teenagers’ problems have equal weight. But this is no young-adult novel. The machinery is far too brutal. Rowling animates her stock tropes with the sordid thrill of edging along the borders of wrongdoing, never overstepping them sufficiently to invoke the very different mechanics of the crime novel, but roaming far from the attractive hearths of social comedy. It is something like Ruth Rendell’s territory, but more crisply described, the writing less inflected by the self-justifying illusions of Rendell’s protagonists.

It rained on Barry Fairbrother’s grave. The ink blurred on the cards. Siobhan’s chunky sunflower head defied the pelting drops, but Mary’s lilies and freesias crumpled, then fell apart. The chrysanthemum oar darkened as it decayed. Rain swelled the river, made streams in the gutters and turned the steep roads into Pagford glossy and treacherous. The windows of the school bus were opaque with condensation; the hanging baskets in the Square became bedraggled, and Samantha Mollison, windscreen wipers on full tilt, suffered a minor collision in the car on the way home from work in the city.

The hopefulness of the young also serves to highlight the depravity of their elders. Adolescence is more likely to be outgrown than the failings of the mature. This contrast is keen in the relationship between Simon Price and his older son, Andrew. Simon is a vicious man whose weakness for shortcuts and cheating has reduced him to self-pitying monstrosity, and Andrew longs for the courage to stand up to his father’s verbal and physical abuse, but his revenge is similarly underhanded. The difference is that he seems to learn something from its fallout.

The Casual Vacancy is not a nostalgic novel; it will not please readers in search of appealing bygones. Instead of the amusingly quaint tale of bucolic foibles that she seems to promise at the start, Rowling gives us something much bigger. How much bigger, it is too soon to say. The great rural novels of the Nineteenth Century, by Brontë, Eliot, and Hardy, were rooted in the unthinking, heartless placidity of country life. Theirs was a world not yet engaged in the profusions and complications that followed the Industrial Revolution. It is hard to know whether their stolid grandeur might coexist with our post-industrial litter, but I daresay that even the Internet will eventually be found to rest on timeless, human-natural foundations. JK Rowling is well on track.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 14th, 2013 at 5:50 pm.