J.K. Rowling: "The Casual Vacancy"

I only bought this book because my book club were reading it, and I nearly didn't get past the first fifty pages because I thought that it was unnecessarily obsessed with sex. I wondered initially whether Rowling had made a deliberate effort to distance herself from Harry Potter and to mark herself out as an 'adult' writer. but as I progressed with the book I decided that I had misjudged her. Rowling is painting a picture of an obsessive society. The book opens with the sudden death of Barry Fairbrother, a man in his forties who also happened to be a local councillor in a divided community. Old Pagford is obsessed with success, money and beauty. The layout of local council boundaries means that the children from the local council estate can attend the beautiful little primary school, and that the council is responsible for the addiction clinic which struggles to meet the needs of the drug addicts from the estate. But now there is a chance for the boundaries to be re-drawn, and for the council estate to fall out of Pagford's remit. This would mean that the clinic would close and that the council estate children with their dirty clothes and foul language would no longer attend the picturesque little school. Barry Fairbrother had been spearheading a campaign to keep things as they were - but Barry is dead. Who will step into his shoes on the local council, and who will fight for the rights of the council estate residents now?

One by one, each of the families we meet in the opening chapters of the novel puts forward a candidate to fill Barry's seat on the council. One by one, the teenagers in each family attempt to wreck their parents' chances of success by revealing the tensions and secrets hidden at the heart of their family lives.

This is a brilliantly observed and deeply sympathetic book. It sympathises with the teenage craving for authenticity and honesty as well as the desperate craving for another shot of youth and health and attractiveness experienced by the aging woman. It sympathises with those trapped in the vicious cycle of drugs, poverty, abuse and violence on the council estate, as well as those trapped by mental illness and alcoholism in the genteel surroundings of Old Pagford. (Interestingly, I didn't think that it was terribly sympathetic to men: in general, the female characters were stronger, better developed and far more mature.) It paints a very interesting picture of how power is sustained and exercised in small communities, and I think that anyone who sits on any committee should read it ....