The Casual Vacancy and the State of 2015 Britain

The BBC’s adaptation of J.K. Rowling’s first adult novel, The Casual Vacancy, is set to be broadcast on HBO the 28th, 29th and 30th of April and with it, Rowling’s acidic snapshot of austerity Britain. Critics deemed the book, which received mixed reviews, too heavy on social commentary. The BBC’s decision to broadcast its adaptation starring a host of British actors led by Michael Gambon—best known for playing Albus Dumbledore—has further garnered accusations of bias ahead of the 2015 general elections. While the BBC offers a less nuanced interpretation, Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy has a distinct political message that is nevertheless complex and mature.
Petty Town Strife and Real Suffering
The Casual Vacancy tells the tale of the seemingly idyllic town of Pagford as tensions resurface when a “casual vacancy” in the parish council arises following the death of well-liked councillor Barry Fairbrother. Fairbrother, who had grown up in the neighbouring council estate, The Fields, was a vocal campaigner against transferring responsibility for the estate to the nearby city of Yarvil. The fight that follows pits local delicatessen owner Howard Mollison and his lawyer son Miles against the more liberal-minded social worker Kay Bawden, Sikh doctor Parminder Jawanda, and school principal Colin Wall. The novel’s overarching conflict is one between petty-town strife—centralized in the reasonably well-off Pagford—and real suffering in the Fields.
Parallel to the squabbling in Pagford runs the story of Fields resident Krystal Weedon, Fairbrother’s protégé and the teenage daughter of a single mother and heroin addict. Rowling’s intent, it seems, is to illustrate the connection between the two worlds in Krystal’s character. No amount of quarreling in Pagford would be novel-worthy if it didn’t directly affect Krystal, whose mother’s recovery depends on Pagford’s continued funding of the Field’s addiction clinic.
Jan Moir of the Daily Mail accordingly complains of bias in the BBC’s screening (during election year) of a “substandard work of working class oppression and parish council venality.” The similarly conservative Daily Telegraph picks up on The Casual Vacancy’s apparent lack of nuance in its “truly jaundiced vision of an England divided into haves and have-nots.” Even The Guardian waded into the debate on its conservative counterparts’ side, albeit with a jocular tone as reviewer Stuart Jeffries ascribed political roles to the inhabitants of Pagford—or as he calls them, “cold-hearted profiteers of austerity-years middle England.” “If they aren’t all Cameroonian lackey,” he adds, “it’s because they like Farage’s stance on Romanians.”
Despite the fact that the only explicitly political mention appears a full 382 pages into the novel, when Pagford is described as “a safe Conservative seat since the 1950s,” there is a grain of truth to reviewers’ accusations of a political tale. As much as The Casual Vacancy revolves around small-town politics, the issues touched upon are favorites with political commentators on the Left.
As far as liberal societal clichés go, Rowling leaves no stone unturned: from differences between boarding schools “like Buckingham Palace” and struggling state schools, to social workers overburdened with cases, resentment towards well-off immigrants, gender violence in a working class family, drug addiction, rape and unemployment in council estates, underlying homophobia—the list indeed goes on. To a certain extent, the television adaptation emphasizes class struggle: the original version of the dispute, during which Pagford wishes to relegate responsibility of The Fields to the neighboring town of Yarvil, has been watered down to an altogether pettier debate over whether town property should be made into a spa or left as an addiction clinic.
Aspiration, Grit and Luck
What the BBC adaptation does capture is J.K Rowling’s knack for characterization. Michael Gambon excels in his role of likeable Howard Mollison, a gentrified, middle-class shop owner (not only does he own a delicatessen, he is also planning to open an upmarket café), plotting behind closed doors for his son to succeed Mr. Fairbrother. Abigail Lawrie—of whom the public is sure to hear in the future—lends as much strength as she does fragility to loud-mouthed if vulnerable Krystal Weedon. More generally, the book and the film successfully portray the lurking nastiness that wallows in the corners of everyday life, seldom cruel enough to be noticed by other writers. The biting descriptions of the relationships between characters typically underline the malevolent glee they derive from each others’ inferiority. Of Ruth, a nurse working in the city hospital and Shirley, wife of the deli owner, Rowling writes,
“Their complicity was still more enjoyable for being spiced by a sense of superiority, because each secretly pitied the other for her choice of husband. To Ruth, Howard was physically grotesque…To Shirley…Ruth’s husband sounded like a reclusive inadequate.”
The Casual Vacancy is, then, less a political statement and more an explication of human nature and the state of British society. Is Howard Mollison a Ukipper? Perhaps. The BBC’s caricature—“Barbarians! Raise the drawbridge and lower the portcullis!” he mutters at the thought of benefits claimants in Pagford—suggests much more than that. Unlike some of her film critics, however, Rowling understands that the fragmentation of the middle and working classes is not so much along class lines as it is along cultural ones. When London-born social worker Kay Bawden accuses the Mollisons of wanting to “draw a line neatly between the home-owning middle classes and the lower [classes],” Miles Mollison is quick to counter, “Pagford’s full of working-class people, Kay; the difference is, most of them work.” Narrow-minded and contemptible though the Mollisons may be, they do not represent the rich stamping firmly down on the poor. On the contrary, they represent the slightly disappointing product of aspiration, grit and a generous dose of luck: a prejudiced shopkeeper with a solicitor son, wealthy enough to pay for his granddaughters to go to private school.
What do we do about Krystal?
In an early interview about the novel, Rowling remarked, “If you were to distill the book into one line, it would be “What do we do about Krystal?” How to deal with Britain’s poorest, most demotivated youth is a political question, and one that has certainly never been more pertinent. Although the likes of Jan Moir may disagree, the solutions Rowling offers are complex—and surprisingly conservative. Fairbrother, who had also been raised in The Fields, offers nothing but aspiration and hard work as an answer: “It’ll be tougher for you than these others, Krys; it was tougher for me. But you can do better.”
There is no explicit denunciation of distorted incentives, but Krystal’s inner monologue—“If she got knocked up by Fats Wall, she would be able to get her own place from the council”—outlines the kind of vicious circles that trap generations within the welfare system. Chillingly, Krystal herself seems aware of the problem’s root cause: “[Fairbrother] had meant working hard at school and stuff, but it was too late for that and, anyway, it was all bollocks. How would reading help her now?” When violence and drug addiction blight young people’s lives, education stops being a priority.
In Shakespeare’s tragedies, blissful, comic irrelevance is reserved for the poor: Juliet’s nurse, Macbeth’s drunk porter. In Pagford, it is the wealthy that deal in laughable mishaps, the frustrated married woman fantasizing with a sixteen-year-old, the housewife whose dream is to be mistaken for a doctor when she volunteers at the local hospital. Tragedy belongs to the working class, and it belongs, more than to anyone else, to Krystal Weedon. It is this state of affairs that Rowling portrays with far more subtlety than the BBC’s adaptation, one that in its symptoms, if perhaps not in its diagnosis, accurately relates to pre-election Britain. If the accompanying political and social analysis is at times heavy-handed, it is redressed by the brilliance with which Krystal’s character shines, and the urgency of the all-too real situation in which she finds herself.
Image Credit: Little, Brown and Company via Wikimedia Commons