The Harry Potter author made a fortune from the provincial life that she now so clearly despises
By: Charles Moore "the telegraph"
'People round here are effing mental,” says Gaia the 16-year-old sexpot from
London in JK Rowling’s new novel The Casual Vacancy. This is an accurate
summary of life in Pagford, the small West Country town in which the action
takes place. Take it from me that Gaia is right, and thus save yourself from
reading the 500 pages of swearing, rape, drug abuse, suicide, drowning,
self-harm, pseudonymous internet denunciations, domestic violence, acne and
meetings of the parish council which Miss Rowling has just inflicted upon
her devoted global fan-base.
If you have seen the film Hot Fuzz, in which the Neighbourhood Watch
association turn out to be a gang of murderers obsessed with winning the
Village of the Year competition, you will get the feel of the plot. The
difference, however, is that Hot Fuzz is a comedy. The Casual Vacancy is
grimly in earnest.
JK Rowling has told the world that this is a book she “had to write”. She
detests snobbery, she says, and she wishes to expose it. She has very simple
codes to indicate who is bad. Anyone who has a slightly out-of-date,
petit-bourgeois Christian name, like Howard, Shirley or Maureen, is bad.
Such people’s evil is proved by the fact that they have carriage lamps
outside their doors, refer to the sitting-room as the “lounge”, wear
deerstalkers (indoors!) and candlewick dressing-gowns. They have – for no
cliché is unturned in this book – hanging baskets, fake log fires and privet
hedges. They look down, snobbishly, on poor people, such as those who live
in the Fields, a council estate uncomfortably close to Pagford. The word JK
Rowling keeps on using is “smug”. She uses that word smugly.
In the Rowling dystopia, the good people, obviously, are any non-whites –
represented, in benighted Pagford, by only one family (of admirable Sikh
doctors) – plus lesbians, social workers and teachers. But lest I give the
impression that virtue gets much play in this book, I should add that the
only truly good character, who carries the name of Barry Fairbrother so that
you can tell at once just how good he is, dies on the first page. Indeed,
one feels that the author’s disapproval of small-town Pharisees is, in part,
a cover to allow her to be horrible about almost everyone.
The most hate-filled descriptions in the book are of Terri Weedon, the
drug-addicted, gap-toothed prostitute who lives in the Fields, and her
repulsive supplier and lover, who also rapes her daughter. He is subtly
named Obbo. Miss Rowling can get away with her savagery in depicting them by
seeming to be on their side against the snobs
.
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