|
J K Rowling
Little, Brown
27 September 2012/ ISBN 9781408704202
General Fiction / Contemporary / Somerset, England
Amazon
||
Amazon
UK
Reviewed
by Rachel A Hyde
When fortysomething
councilor, Barry Fairbrother drops dead, it is a death that takes
everybody by surprise. Suddenly, there is a casual vacancy on the
parish council to be filled, which is wanted for many reasons by
quite a number of people. But this means there is also strife, not
only between the well-off inhabitants of picturesque Pagford and
the denizens of murky council estate the Fields, but within families
too. Nothing will be quite the same again…
Nor quite the same with readers who grew up with Harry Potter! This
is certainly a total change from the escapism of Hogwarts to a warts-and-all
pitch-black social satire. There is the feeling from page one that
this is a book Ms Rowling has wanted to write for a long time, and
demonstrates amply that she can write more than YA fantasy. She
paints a bleak and uncomfortably realistic picture of a place at
war with itself and its neighbors over a council seat, and the power
to realize ambitions. Perhaps tainting all this realism a little
is the fact there is hardly anybody in the book who is even pleasant
and what emerges in many cases is a larger-than-life rogue’s
gallery of grotesques. We know there are people out there like this,
but here there is a large quantity all within a small space! The
Fields is a horror, drawn large as a sort of hellmouth to gaze into,
although in its way, no worse than the smug and warring middle class
families from Pagford. There are a few characters to sympathize
with, most notably Krystal, whose unhappy and poverty-stricken life
and bursts of violence is offset by her love and care for her equally
neglected little brother. To its detriment, this is a very long
book and at times it flags, sags, and becomes repetitive. A bit
of judicial editing would have done wonders for what is essentially
a powerful book, difficult to define, and equally difficult to put
down. Ms Rowling has more adult fiction planned and I look forward
to seeing what she comes up with next.
Reviewers Note:
Some sex and drug abuse
|
