Like a lot of people, I was a voracious devourer of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series. It was great fun, and I’d come to enjoy much of the affiliated cultural stuff around it, even though I found the movies largely tedious and grew a bit weary towards the end. This weariness wasn’t because I didn’t enjoy the stories, of course, it’s just that I was ready to move on. I was really curious about what Rowling, who’d gone from “nobody” to the “world’s most famous writer” in short order, was going to write next, once the whole Potter business was over with.

With the release a couple of weeks back of The casual Vacancy, we found out.

I’ve just finished the book, which was marketed as Rowling’s first “adult” novel (despite the fact that the Potter series was read by pretty much everyone), and, in short, I quite liked it, in particular because of it’s differences from what’s come before.

The casual Vacancy is, first and foremost, grounded in the real world (not actually the real world, but rather that sort of hyper-real setting with occasional exaggerations that feels more real than reality). There’s no spells, magical creatures, or world-shattering consequences. It’s all on a rather small scale, dealing largely with the goings-on in a small English village in the wake of a sudden death leading to an opening on the town’s governing council, and how the potential shift in the balance of power amongst the town’s movers and shakers will affect the lives of the people living there, particularly the residents of The Fields, a council housing project between Pagford and neighboring city Yarvil.

Though he dies (no real spoilers there) in the first pages of the novel, Barry Fairbrother is the driving force behind the story’s events. His sudden absence from the lives of the people of the town of Pagford and how it affects them *is* the story. We get to know life in Pagford through the eyes of numerous characters, all Barry’s friends and rivals, admirers and detractors, each reacting to the vacuum his absence creates, and the resulting class and social tensions in the community.

I’m not going to go into plot details, as I’d suggest the book is well worth reading for yourself, though the way the story plays out through the eyes of these several dozen characters, all well-drawn, eccentric and flawed, is engaging and unfolds in often clever ways (even if the ending comes off as a little bit rushed).

In the end, the story is a vehicle for social commentary, touching on class rivalies, the viability of social safety net programs, and religious diversity, among others. While I was never in doubt as to where Rowling’s personal feelings lie, she gets to the heart of all sides of most arguments – those characters whose positions she doesn’t necessarily sympathize with never fall to the level of strawmen – letting the story suggest the author’s personal convictions rather than simply having characters become exposition mouthpieces. On this level, it’s a well-drawn examination of a wide variety of social issues important to most of us in the western world, looked at through a particularly English lens.

Rowling writes in an engaging prose style, often cleverer than that she employed across the Potter series (the flagrant abuse of and bludgeoning by adverbs is much reduced here), in part, I suspect, because she wasn’t necessarily burdened with writing toward children. Much of the novel is made up of the interior thoughts of characters toward another, and I got the particular impression she greatly enjoyed coming up with these scathing private criticisms.

Also, there’s the sex and cursing, which seemed to have shocked some critics, given Rowling’s background in children’s fantasy. Again, this is a book for a different market (not that many of her fans wouldn’t enjoy it anyway), and it all fits within the world she creates, and serves to drive the narrative. Well distant from the presence of unicorns, Rowling is able to be more than merely glancingly suggestive and serve the needs of the story with the occasional prurient thoughts and actions; the kind of thoughts and actions that people in realist worlds actually have and engage in.

As I said above, my experience with this novel was a positive experience. It was a different experience than reading Harry Potter, with touches of Jane Austen, Coen Brother movies, and Tony Blair along the way, but all told through the clever prose and emotional connection to character that Rowling exhibited as she wrote one of the best selling fantasy series in history. It’s worth taking a look at.