Casual Vacancy

When Barry Fairbrother dies unexpectedly in his early forties the little town of Pagford is left in shock. Pagford is seemingly an English idyll with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey but what lies behind the pretty façade is a town at war. Rich at war with poor teenagers at war with their parents wives at war with their husbands teachers at war with their pupils&8230;Pagford is not what it first seems. And the empty seat left by Barry on the parish council soon becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen. Who will triumph in an election fraught with passion duplicity and unexpected revelations? Blackly comic thought-provoking and constantly surprising The Casual Vacancy is J.K. Rowling&8217;s first novel for adults. Q&A with J.K Rowling "The
Casual Vacancy" is radically different from Harry Potter. What made you want to write it? I had the idea on a plane this time- not on a train- and was immediately very excited by it. It is another novel about morality and mortality as Harry Potter was but contemporary. Its set in a small community which involves writing characters who are adolescents all the way up to people in their sixties. I love nineteenth century novels that centre on a town or village. This is my attempt to do a modern version. Why is it called "The Casual Vacancy"? Were there other possible titles? The working title was Responsible because a central theme is how much responsibility each of us has for where we are in life - our happiness our health and our wealth - and also the responsibility we have
towards other people - our partners our children and wider society. However when I came across the phrase a casual vacancy which is the correct term for a seat left empty on a council by the death of one of its members I knew at once that I had my new title. The title speaks to me on many different levels. First of all it seemed to me that the greatest casual vacancy is death itself which often arrives with no fanfare and creates unfillable vacuums. I was also aware that all of my characters have lacks and deficiencies in their lives that they are attempting to fill in a variety of ways: with food drink drugs fantasies or rebellious behaviour. These too could be called casual vacancies: those little emptinesss that we are perhaps not entirely conscious that we possess and yet we still feel
the need to assuage. The novel has been described as blackly comic? Can you tell us a little more about the humour in the book? The humours rather dark. I wouldnt have described it as a black comedy personally. Perhaps a comic tragedy! Do you think its a particularly British novel? How much is it specifically about Britain today and how much does it contain universal themes? While the setting and characters are I think quintessentially English I am dealing with universal themes. My social issues are relevant anywhere: family and marital conflict the tensions between parents and their children the ideological conflict between an emphasis on self-reliance and state provided support. Its a book about a divided community - and one of those divisions is between adults and children - why? As
families in developed western soc"