Muggle Monday (22): The Casual Vacancy Release Week

It's time for Muggle Monday, in which I post a quote, a video, or a significant piece of news from the Harry Potter franchise. This is somewhat inspired by the Mundane Monday posts by The Mundie Moms.

But let's be real as to why I made up this meme: I just want the opportunity to post something about Harry Potter.


This week, I'm featuring J.K. Rowling's new book, The Casual Vacancy - the release date for which is this Thursday, September 27! I can't believe it's happening this week! Where did all the time go? As part of the promotion for the book, Jo has been taking part in interviews and a brand new synopsis - much more detailed than the previous - has been released to explain to us what this enigma of a novel is going to be about:

The story opens with the death of a parish councillor in the pretty West Country village of Pagford. Barry had grown up on a nearby council estate, the Fields, a squalid rural ghetto with which the more pious middle classes of Pagford have long lost patience. If they can fill his seat with one more councillor sympathetic to their disgust, they'll secure a majority vote to reassign responsibility for the Fields to a neighbouring council, and be rid of the wretched place for good.
The pompous chairman assumes the seat will go to his son, a solicitor. Pitted against him are a bitterly cold GP and a deputy headmaster crippled by irreconcilable ambivalence towards his son, an unnervingly self-possessed adolescent whose subversion takes the unusual but highly effective form of telling the truth. His preoccupation with "authenticity" develops into a fascination with the Fields and its most notorious family, the Weedons.
Terri Weedon is a prostitute, junkie and lifelong casualty of chilling abuse, struggling to stay clean to stop social services taking her three-year-old son, Robbie, into care. But methadone is a precarious substitute for heroin, and most of what passes for mothering falls to her teenage daughter, Krystal. Spirited and volatile, Krystal has known only one adult ally in her life – Barry – and his sudden death casts her dangerously adrift. When anonymous messages begin appearing on the parish council website, exposing villagers' secrets, Pagford unravels into a panic of paranoia, rage and tragedy.

Jo also talks about what we can expect from The Casual Vacancy:

“I think there is a through-line,” Rowling said. “Mortality, morality, the two things that I obsess about.” “The Casual Vacancy” is not a whodunnit but, rather, a rural comedy of manners that, having taken on state-of-the-nation social themes, builds into black melodrama. Its attention rotates among several Pagford households, in the Southwest of England: a gourmet-grocery owner and his wife; two doctors; a nurse married to a printer; a social worker. Most of the families include troubled teens. 

“It’s been billed, slightly, as a black comedy, but to me it’s more of a comic tragedy,” she said. If the novel had precedents, “it would be sort of nineteenth-century: the anatomy and the analysis of a very small and closed society.” A local election was “a perfect way in,” she said. “It’s the smallest possible building block of democracy—this tiny atom on which everything rests.” One could say that national politics does not rest upon local politics, and that no modern British town is a closed society; some of Rowling’s characters may seem eccentric for the earnestness with which they regard a local election. She acknowledged that the scale of parish-council decision-making is “easy to laugh at” but said that “part of the point is that those decisions that are being made do dramatically affect people’s lives, up to life and death sometimes.”

“In my head, the working title for a long time was ‘Responsible,’ because for me this is a book about responsibility. In the minor sense—how responsible we are for our own personal happiness, and where we find ourselves in life—but in the macro sense also, of course: how responsible we are for the poor, the disadvantaged, other people’s misery.” Two years in, she picked up the standard British handbook for local administrators. “I needed it to check certain abstruse points. And in there I came across the phrase ‘a casual vacancy.’ Meaning, when a seat falls vacant through death or scandal. And immediately I knew that that was the title. . . . I was dealing not only with responsibility but with a bunch of characters who all have these little vacancies in their lives, these emptinesses in their lives, that they’re all filling in various ways.”

With terms like "black melodrama" and "comic tragedy" being thrown around, I am officially very much intrigued with The Casual Vacancy. I just know that Jo is going to be able bring those themes to life with her brilliance perfectly. Another thing she does well is building complex webs of character relations and it sounds like she'll be putting that ability to use in The Casual Vacancy - the story will follow several different families in the town of Pagford. I will admit that I do still have slight doubt about the premise - I never thought I would be finding myself reading about an English village's parish-council election. Jo's involvement is pretty much the only reason I would ever consider reading about such a banal subject. But I do have absolute confidence in her storytelling abilities, her sense of humour, and her clever imagination. I can't wait to read The Casual Vacancy (hopefully right when it comes out)! My review may be posted a few weeks later, however, due to prior review commitments.

How about you? Will you be reading J.K. Rowling's first post-Potter book, and if so, will you be reading it as soon as possible or waiting a bit? Will you be purchasing it or borrowing it? Do you plan on posting a review on your blog? Let me know in the comments!