Minus the magic, though, good and evil are depressingly human, and while the characters are all well drawn and believable, they aren’t much fun. As in the Harry Potter books, children make mistakes and join together with a common cause, accompanied here by adults, some malicious, some trying yet failing. Secrets are revealed, relationships twist and break, and the book rolls toward its awful, logical climax with aplomb. Rowling is relentlessly competent: all these people and their hatreds and hopes are established and mixed together. In tiny Pagford, and at its school, which caters to rich and poor alike, everyone is connected: obstreperous teenager Krystal Weedon, the sole functioning member of her working-class family, hooks up with the middle-class son of her guidance counselor the social worker watching over Krystal’s drug-addled mother dates the law partner of the son of the dead man’s fiercest Council rival Krystal’s great-grandmother’s doctor was Fairbrother’s closest ally the daughters of the doctor and the social worker work together, along with the best friend of Krystal’s hookup and so on. When Councilor Barry Fairbrother-born in Fields but now a middle-class Pagforder-dies suddenly, the fight gets uglier. The characters in The Casual Vacancy by J K Rowling are each trapped in their own universe of interests, surrounded by their own self focused motives. There’s a massive divide between the haves and the have-nots-the residents of the Fields, the council flats that some want to push off onto a neighboring county council. Ultimately, The Casual Vacancy is a book that understands there are no magic wands. Yet despite the lack of invisibility cloaks and pensieves, Pagford isn’t so different from Harry’s world. Instead of a battle for worldwide domination, there’s a fight over a suddenly empty seat on that Council, the vacancy of the title. It’s resolutely unmagical: the closest thing to wizardry is the ability to hack into the amateurish Pagford Parish Council Web site.

On the face of it, Rowling’s first adult book is very different from the Harry Potter books that made her rich and famous.

The casual vacancy review