The Casual Vacancy - J K Rowling (2)

Of course, no sooner had I finished my previous blog than I googled "Rowling" and "Dickens" and established, conclusively, that there is no such thing as a new idea. In fact, the association between JKR and CD was established long before this novel, in, for example, interviews and comments by JKR herself. And there is the answer to the Christmas ghosts reference. Simply put, the reference to Dickens is there because JKR wants us to approach her dark novel of life in 21st century England in the same way we think of Dickens' social commentary in his novels. Dickens did not have any simple solutions for the situations he found his characters in - neither does Rowling.

Drawing a link between yourself and one of the greatest English novelists is a bold step, and Rowling has a long way to go in terms of building her canon before any such parallels are justified - to be honest they are a bit ridiculous at this point in her literary career. You can't argue with the impact of Potter, but however much it crossed over into adult readership, and however much it addresses serious themes, it remained a work of children's literature. You have to admire her chutzpah though, and if you are going to adopt a role model you could do much worse than Dickens. Of course I am not suggesting Rowling is equating her work with CD, simply saying that she would like her novel to be thought of in the same way ie as serious social commentary.

Having said there is no such thing as a new idea, so far I have not found anyone online pointing out the echoes of Christmas Carol with this novel, so I am feeling a bit smug as of now.

One other thought about this novel - Rowling seems to experience a visceral disgust with fat people, men in particular. She attracted some flak in the Potter novels with this tendency, and built in positive overweight figures later on in the series to balance the impression given by the Dursleys and others. Here fat is strongly associated with nastiness, laziness, and corruption, and is described with a distaste bordering on disgust. A sympathetic character equates obesity with drug abuse, and while Character A says X therefore the author thinks X is obviously too simplistic for words, the insistence of her returning time after time to the observation that the fat middle class men in this book are unattractive and unpleasant really leaves an unavoidable impression that she equates obesity with moral weakness. Fat teenagers are one thing - fat middle aged people are just bad.

Last comment on this edition - what a bad, lazy cover!

The Casual Vacancy - J K Rowling

This is a bit of a trojan horse of a book - ostensibly about middle England's parochial concerns about a vacancy on the parish council of a small town in the West Country, this novel actually addresses a wide range of social issues, from self harm, racism, prostitution, domestic violence, etc, etc. Its like an episode of the Archers on crack.

The litmus test, as always, is was it a good read? The change of style from the Hogwarts novels is dramatic, and takes time to adjust. We then have a large cast of broadly similar characters doing largely similar things. Sorting out who is who takes a while. The election, when it finally comes, is a damp squib (ha ha, Hogwarts joke there for you) and some of the more melodramatic plot twists are telegraphed some way off. So far so bad, but despite that I found myself turning pages interested in what happens next.

Rowling's middle England is a bleak, dark place. There's not one happy family - all the children seem to despise their parents, with good reason. Huge psychological neuroses are carried around on shoulders young and old. A doctor refuses to treat a heart attack patient. There is no love or affection that is fulfilled. The only glimmer of hope for this community dies in the first chapter.

This novel has attracted over 500 Amazon reviews, so the chances of me having much original to say about it are slim. It has been portrayed as a political attack on the middle class, sneeringly done by someone whose political roots and allegiances are with the council estate rather than the detached mansions she now inhabits. This is of course simplistic; Rowling has not rewritten Hard Times here. But the mention of Dickens leads me cunningly on to what I think might be an original point. In this novel the Parish Council website is hacked four times, by four different characters, and messages are posted on the sites comment forum by "the ghost of Barry Fairweather". Note - "the ghost of BF", not "BF's ghost". Four ghosts - ring any bells? I think there is a deliberate, subtle reference here to the four ghosts in A Christmas carol, including the three Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. Is Robbie Weedon a Tiny Tim figure perhaps?

Why - just a coincidence, or is Rowling making a more subtle point about regret. There is no Scrooge-like redemption at the end of this novel, and I clearly can't build much of a case for the reference - but I bet it is there somewhere.

The End: Germany, 1944-45 by Ian Kershaw

As readers we are as guilty as the rest of the media when it comes to our insatiable obsession with the second world war. We just keep returning to it, drawn irresistibly, by that haunting "what if?". Here the focus is on the last year of the war in Europe (incidentally, it would have been nice if Kershaw had even acknowledged that there was a war going on elsewhere) and tries to answer the question - why did Germany fight on into 1945 when the end was only a matter of time, and when the cost was so high in terms of human life and destruction of property, including Germany's cultural heritage.

Asked this question a non-historian would hazard that the Nazi party, its leadership, in particular Hitler, would have had something to do with it, and of course this is the case. So successful had the Nazi's been in making themselves part of every aspect of German existence that the thought of giving up when their leaders where still promising victory was inconceivable. factor in the mythology of the stab in the back surrender of 1918 and the scene was set to a fanatical fight to the death. The detail of this is portrayed by this book - and it is fascinating to see how the administration managed to keep mundane activities running almost up to the end of the war. More chilling is the retribution meted out to anyone who tried to hasten the end of the war, or surrender, even with the Allies at the point of victory.

Kershaw makes very effective use of letters home and diaries, as well as other sources such as secretly recorded prisoners of war, to get nearer to the heart of what ordinary Germans really thought about the end of the war. The illusion of Hitler's invulnerability was extremely strong.

There are a few things I would like to have seen covered in this book. Firstly, the war is portrayed as a European battlefield, and while the focus was on Germany I don't see how the context of the World War could be ignored. Secondly, the war the conflict to the north and south of Germany is largely ignored, along with pretty much any other non-Germanic part of the conflict. As I understand it Germany had large reserves of forces in for example Norway which were never called into the final struggle for the homeland - why not, when old men and young boys were being pushed into uniform? Finally, we hear time and again that many Germans clung to the hope of some secret weapon that the Nazis were working on. We are led to believe that these were simply false hopes, rumours dreamt up by a desperate populace and allowed to spread by a propaganda machine running out of lies. But is that the whole story - was there really no German research into new weapons that could, potentially, have turned the course of the war?