If you are expecting Harry Potter, you will be in for a
shock, because this new book has nothing to do with the fairy tale universe of
the young adult series. I think it is best to approach this book without
misconceptions about the author and her previous work. Blank slate.
My first thoughts of the book were that it is less of a
story than a social commentary on the life of a little town plagued by gossip,
poverty, addiction and greed. Some compared it to Dickens. I would dare to
compare it to Emile Zola’s characterization of the working class in “Germinal”.
I remember reading Zola in high school, guided then by a teacher, with some
unionist agenda, regurgitating the fashionable socialist propaganda of the
time, which glorified the working class and bashed the “bourgeois”. I remember
thinking that this biased interpretation was wrong and that Zola was really
exposing the ‘sins’ of both classes. I did not challenge my teacher then,
mostly out of cowardice, and it took many years, as well as the exposure to the
other extreme of the political agenda here in the USA to understand what this
teacher really meant at the time. I could not understand problems of the
working class, because I had not been exposed to the hardship of poverty,
coming from a fairly traditional upper middle class French family. We did not
have a lot of money, but we were not poor, certainly not in the extremes
described in the book. And I refused to apologize for the little money we had
and the effort my family made to earn it. Because I was refusing socialism as
the accepted norm in a society where the mere mention of money was
automatically placing you in the very hated group of selfish capitalists and
anti-intellectuals, and, where for a few years infatuation with the Soviet
model prompted Government workers to float the red flag on the front of
official post offices instead of the French flag, I completely rejected the
whole idea of social contribution. I felt I was unfairly judged, because I did
not belong to the working class, but was the daughter of self-employed little
shop owners, who according to the rhetoric of the time were maybe a lot worse
than the richest capitalists. This lack of acceptance and social extremism, which
was then played in the media, blinded me to the realities of poverty. I was
uneducated socially. I had not lived it. I had not experienced it “in the
flesh” so to speak. Mostly, I lacked compassion. And, because I felt isolated
in that society, I rejected it.
When I read the “Casual Vacancy”, I had a Zola flashback. Rowling-does-Zola
is about a non-complacent description of poverty, greed, small minds trapped in
their middle class prejudices, with a brutal honesty turned to sarcasm and
cynicism. I predict that as Zola’s, Rowling’s novel may become a snapshot of
the social inequalities and the hypocrisy of our time and, as such, may become
a classic. Nobody is spared in “The Casual Vacancy”. When Barry Fairbrother
dies, and his seat on the council becomes vacant, gossip, covetousness, envy
and political manipulations invade the otherwise-dull lives of each potential
successors and their families. The meaningless and vile motives of each one of
the adult characters, following their own greedy narrow-minded agendas, drive a
sequence of events, leading to the unavoidable dramatic conclusion: hurting at
the end the purest and most innocent victim of this book. The contentious piece
is “The Fields”, a section of town, ghetto for the poorest population, littered
with garbage, used condoms, graffiti, and harboring drug addicts and their
dealers, unemployed and beyond-damaged individuals without hope. Children from
The Fields attend school with their richer counterparts, creating
confrontations and misunderstandings. Few leave The Fields to succeed and
Fairbrother was one of those, which did not prevent him to lose some of his
innocence later on as a politician, but he never forgot his origins and
continued to support social contributions to that part of town as well as the
drug rehabilitation clinic he sponsored. Fairbrother may very well be the less
immoral adult of the book, except he is dead.
It is interesting that Rowling mostly directs her anger at
the adult characters, who all have lost their innocence, their spontaneity and
who are corrupted in their deepest moral cores. Their corruption is not
necessarily conscious, but driven by their own greediness and petty
inspirations. They have lost their morality, because they are caught in political
popularity contest, a power-hungry race for control. That control may be
physical, moral, ethical or simply control of their self-destructive impulses.
From the violent man, buying stolen equipment and abusing his wife and son, the
other father unable to stop inappropriate impulses and his wife covering for
him, a tiger mother indifferent to the dyslexic daughter not meeting her
expectations, stories of adultery, a social worker deluded in her love and powerless
in face of the bureaucratic social services, rejection and complete
misunderstanding of their children, sex without love, rape and drug abuse, the
main psychological drive of these characters is control (or lack thereof) and
its consequences. When an angry teenager impersonates the now-dead Fairbrother
and post a vengeful blog in his name, revealing one seat contender deepest
darkest secret, an implacable Rube Goldberg machine is set in motion, which
will ultimately lead to the demise of the weakest characters of the book.
Rowling does not redeem her characters. She crushes them with violence equal to
their sins. The innocents are not spared; they bear the consequences of the
sins of their elders. Just like in real life, it is far from being fair, and
often the ones to suffer are not the perpetrators but the children, victims of
the immoral choices, lack of control and greed of their elders.
This constitutes the moral tale of this book: we all are
responsible. Our society, blind to poverty, treating with contempt the most
vulnerable individuals of a population, is doomed to collapse and cause harm to
the children, hereby setting in perpetual motion the vicious circle of abuse,
misery, bigotry, lack of education, into self-destruction. Even acts of charity
-one woman volunteers in the local hospital- are dissected for their real vain
motivations: not to really help others, but to gain a psychological self-absorption
profit and access to the latest gossip. Rowling is relentless in describing the
hidden motivations in what would appear to be ‘good actions’ on the outside,
but are motivated by much less pure feelings. The richest exert control over
the poorest, while condemning their transgressions in moral judgments.
Meanwhile, their own transgressions are well hidden under the veil of
propriety. The poorest are not without fault either and their poverty does not
bring them to the level of sanctity (far from it); on the contrary, their lives
are described without pity. They are unable to get themselves out of their
hole, are uneducated and abusive. It is clear that without constant and
consistent help from the society, they will never get out of their situation
and even then, they are so damaged that relapse may happen at any time and with
any trigger. This highlights the difficulty of social work, which may seem
futile in face of such misery and may appear worthless, a waste of money and
effort to help individuals without moral value or work ethics. Rowling is
ruthless with the system, and of course her implied solution, would be that
this effort has to be born from the entire community without exception, with
opportunities given at the earliest age and education of the children as well
as the parents. This would imply selflessness and altruism, which none of her adult
characters is capable of feeling. I did not understand it in my teenage years
either, until I was confronted with poverty and the absence of social help from
society in the USA. As I was not sheltered anymore in my comfortable life and
was exposed to poverty, which I observed in some students and around me, I
started to understand what the absence of social protection really meant and
that, when individuals would slip so low into their addiction, delusion and
lack of hope, not much could be done. Prevention remains the key and of course
it takes longer to break the circle of hopelessness.
As JK Rowling describes in a recent interview, the main
theme of the book is the absence of love. I would say, it is certainly the
absence of compassion. When I attended the “Mind and Life” conference a few
years ago in Washington DC, the Dalai Lama discussed something I will never
forget. He described that there are two kinds of compassion: one we naturally
experience when we see harm happening to an individual (or even an animal) and
one we acquire through life experiences and which has to be cultivated. He also
said that when individuals were exposed to very traumatic, harmful, painful
experiences from an early age on, they may toughen and lose that natural
compassion, and they certainly do not learn to cultivate the one we acquire
through life. Of course without this, they perpetuate the circle of violence
and harm. Most of us do forget to cultivate compassion on a daily basis,
because we are so involved in our little life problems, just like I was when I
was in high school and even sometime later on. Like the individuals in the
book, we create our own suffering and propagate it to others. Therefore, we
never stop the circle, and it goes around and comes back. In order to see reality
the way it is, we have to shed our preconceptions first and embrace the others
without moral judgments, the good and the bad alike. Tough to do in a society
where we are brainwashed to judge and compete on a daily basis. Buddhists call this
vicious circle Karma and certainly there is plenty of bad Karma in JK Rowling’s
book. The teenagers seem to be the only ones with enough innocence and morality
left, which has not yet been destroyed by adulthood. Maybe they just have not
accumulated enough bad karma yet. The ultimate hero of the book is the young
Indian teenager, bullied and self-harming, but morally intact, whose ultimate
act of courage shows us that there is still hope, when we are able to feel and
express compassion.
