In an interview with The Guardian’s Decca Aitkenhead last weekend, JK Rowling said: “I
just needed to write this book. I like it a lot, I’m proud of it, and that
counts for me.”
Well, I think she’s right to be proud of The Casual Vacancy, and I said as much
when I reviewed it for the Daily Express
this week. Even though Rowling’s first book for adults features “teenage sex,
drug addiction, swearing and scenes that would make Harry Potter blush,” I
called it “a highly readable morality tale for our times.”
The book’s been out for two days now and everyone I
know is desperate to read it. My husband’s visiting my daughter in Paris this
weekend and the first thing she asked him to bring from the UK was a prized copy
of The Casual Vacancy. “I’m going to
stay in all weekend and read it,” she said happily. “I can’t wait.” Her excitement took me back to the old days, when we used to drive to the old Borders shop in
Oxford and queue at midnight for each newly published Harry Potter story.
I’ve been stunned by the vitriol that JK Rowling has attracted
in some quarters this week. The New York
Times’s Michiko Kakutani judged her book to be “willfully banal” and
“depressingly clichéd” and said it read like “an odd mash-up of a dark soap
opera like Peyton Place.” And writing in the Daily Mail, Jan Moir acidly declared that it was “more than 500 pages of
relentless socialist manifesto masquerading as literature crammed down your
throat.”
I completely disagree with both of them. The Casual Vacancy isn’t perfect by any
means, but it’s a gripping story. I read it in one go, barely glancing up to
make a cup of tea or switch the lights on as dusk fell. Yes, the themes are
dark, most of the characters are unlikeable and Rowling’s style is workmanlike
rather than literary, but she is a brilliant storyteller. There was no way in a
million years that I could have stopped reading this book. In my newspaper
review I gave it four out of five stars and I stand by every word.
