What I’m Reading: The Casual Vacancy

I picked up J. K. Rowling’s first non-Potter book from our local public library because my thirteen year old daughter wanted to read it.  Knowing that it was more of an adult than young adult novel, and having heard that it was filled with sex and violence, I thought it prudent to read it first before allowing my daughter to read it.

The Casual Vacancy proves that Rowling isn't just a young adult /children’s author.  There is nothing of the magical lovability of the Harry Potter stories; there is very little in The Casual Vacancy that is charming or endearing.  Where Hogwarts of the Harry Potter novels was filled with endless wonder and courageous friends, Pagford of The Casual Vacancy is filled with drugs and prostitution and rape.  It’s a good book – but it’s a difficult book to like or to enjoy.

It’s not the sex or the violence or the profanity that put me off.  It was the unrelenting noxiousness of the characters.  The book is shorter than most of the Harry Potter novels, but as I read it, it felt much longer because there are no characters to root for.  There are no heroes. Liars, cowards, gossips, egoists, drug-addicts, and thieves – the only seemingly decent character dies in the first few pages.  It is his death that unleashes the submerged and hidden fears and envies and prides of the community.

For all that, it is, as I said, a good book; well written and even profound in places.  Rowling is as capable a satirist as she is an author of fantasy. But will I let my thirteen year old daughter read it?

My first instinct was to say, “No.”  I want to protect and shield her from many of the things described in A Casual Vacancy.  But three things have caused me to change my mind.

One- I read Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange and Stephen King’s The Shining when I was thirteen.  I don’t think I was permanently scarred or damaged by reading them then. Two – My daughter has already read (twice through) the entire bible.  Plenty of sex and violence in there… and Three – I trust my daughter.  She’s smart and well grounded and able to discriminate between good and evil. 

So, yes, I will let my thirteen year old daughter read J. K. Rowling’s new novel.  I don’t expect that she’ll like it with the intensity that she has liked (loved!) the Potter novels.  Knowing my daughter, I don’t expect that she’ll like it at all.  But I will let her read it.