Christianity Today has published a challenging and thoughtful review of Casual Vacancy by Lavonne Neff at its website. An excerpt:

Everyone agreed that Pagford has nothing to do with Hogwarts: “The only obvious parallel with the Potter books is that, like them, it is animated by a strong dislike of mean, unsympathetic, small-minded folk,” says Tait. But everyone may have read too quickly. The Casual Vacancy and the Harry Potter series are alike in one important respect. Both are based on a profoundly biblical worldview.

Look at how Rowling uses religious themes.

Chapter 1 introduces us to “the pretty little town of Pagford,” dominated by “the dark skeleton of the ruined abbey.” The expensive houses are located in Church Row. The church itself is “mock-Gothic.” The townspeople, we will learn in later chapters, use the building for school plays and council meetings and parties. Another former church, Bellchapel, has been turned into an addiction treatment center. The Old Vicarage is now owned by a Sikh family. Rowling seems to want us to know that the world of The Casual Vacancy is decidedly post-Christian. It is what Quaker theologian D. Elton Trueblood once termed a “cut flower civilization”: pretty now, but rootless and doomed.

Do read the whole thing!

Welcome Guests from the 18 December 2013 Diane Rehm Show about Casual Vacancy!

If you’re looking for a place to start in the posts below, Post #3 details how much cursing there actually was in the book , Post #4 how very autobiographical this book is (and why that shouldn’t matter), and Post #5 is an exegesis of the not very subtle political allegory of John Bull and his wife the Queen vs. the Empire’s legacy and promise in its outliers. After that? 6, 8, 11, and 12 will help you see the anagogical meaning that reviewers and first time readers miss in haste and because the social message is so loud.

Enjoy!

The Original Introduction to the Post:

I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to throw together my first thoughts and questions on J. K. Rowling’s new novel, Casual Vacancy, but I found time today to write up some of my impressions after a hurried reading last weekend. This is only a small beginning, of course, for a thousand neglected topics. I think immediately of the Casual Vacancy title and Part captions, the propaganda quality of the work,  and how much our reading of this book because we love our Harry Potter experience colors our appreciation of the novel. None of that below, though you will find literary alchemy, the political and personal allegories, and a word by profane word count on the cussing in Vacancy among other subjects

We’ll get to the neglected topics I mentioned and others soon enough, I’m sure. I hope in the twelve threads below to jump start our conversation of the artistry and meaning and experience of Casual Vacancy, subjects I suspect have been largely lost in the fanfare and shock of the book’s publication. Thank you in advance for joining the discussion and for inviting all the serious reader friends you know to jump in, too!

1. The Harry Potter Echoes

2. MuggleMarch or A Modern Moonacre Manor

3. Potter to Potty-Mouth: The Profanity by the Numbers

4. Literary Narcissism or The Art of the Psychic Realm

5. Barry Fairbrother and the Political Parable

6. Literary Alchemy: The Conjunction of Sex and Death

7. The Seven Part Ring Composition

8. Andrew and Gaia: Fallen Man and the Natural World?

9. Andrew and Stuart: Doppelganger, Ouroboros, or Diptych?

10. The JayZ song  ‘Umbrella’

11. Religion: Christian Hypocrites and Sympathetic Sikhs

12. Authenticity and Hypocrisy:’Penetration,’ Suffering, and the Birth of Consciousness

Post First Week Round-up:

13. Christianity Today: ‘Profoundly Biblical Worldview’

14. Notable Reviews, High and Low

15.  Guest Post: A Telling Re-Take of ‘The Good Samaritan’?

Pagford’s village existentialist is the adolescent nihilist named Stuart ‘Fats’ Wall, the kid so cool that he doesn’t care what clique or gang you belong to, he can relate to you just as he is. He’s hipper in his own way than Ferris Bueller.

Fats’ byword and the standard by which he measure real against unreal is “authenticity.” He values the authentic because it is what it is without pretension or feigned substance; it is the opposite of everything which hypocrisy is not.

If Fats’ end is any indication, though, Vacancy is anything but a celebration of or advocacy piece for the existential appreciation of authenticity. Fats winds up a remorseful young man burdened by his responsibility for the deaths of Krystall and Robby, lives that were lost because of his indifference to the situations and reality of others (especially those for whom ‘hypocrisy’ and ‘authenticity’ are abstractions they cannot afford to parse).

The birth of consciousness that Fats experiences in his remorse, his discovery of a greater Self than his delusional individuality, is a transformation that Casual Vacancy seems designed to deliver to us all. We are invited into the thinking, relatively narrow and broad, of a host of characters of great diversity. I think we each become more aware through reading Mugglemarch of our own narrow mindedness and selfishness, not to mention our failings and potential as parents, siblings, friends, children, and members of our communities. The chief virtue of Austen and Dickens protagonists, mental ‘penetration’ or insightful sympathy, is fostered in us as we reflect on our pathetic images in the story mirror.

I ask your comments and corrections, of course!

I hope to write a ‘Seven Keys to Casual Vacancy‘ post sooner than later and a big part of the postmodern chapter will have to be a discussion of the religious content in this novel. Everyone is nominally Christian — they go to funerals, celebrate Christmas, etc. — but none are devotional Christians of any spiritual substance, no one reads scripture or self reflects outside of a secular humanist, post-Christian mind-set, and there is no solace in community, which word means only government and never anything ecclesiastic or truly communal.

The only sort of religious people in the books are the ethnic Indians who are nominally Sikhs. The husband is uncomfortable with the picture of the guru on the wall though Minda likes it. The children prefer to be pretend Christians than explain to their friends how they are neither Sikh nor Muslim per their sect’s founding vision. The wife and mother, at story’s end rejects the husband’s suggestion that they make retreat to the Golden Temple. He, the godlike character above all the strife of the book, understands the importance and necessity of religious observance, at least in times of crisis.

But as one character observes in her nightmare situation, “this is how people go religious,” with “religious” used as a synonym for “bonkers” and “addle-brained.” I’m guessing based on my limited experience (all through UK friends) and reading on the subject that this is not Rowling’s prescriptive view but her realist description of spirituality in the UK today and what sort of people it creates.

I’d love to read your thoughts on the nominal faith of the characters and their egregious hypocrisy as well. Is this a gratuitous slap at the faithful or a valid description of the barrenness of the spiritual landscape Rowling grew up and lives in? as believer or non-believer, what were your thoughts about the church and faiths depicted in Casual Vacancy?

You can read the lyrics to the song, Umbrella,  here. You can watch the JayZ -Rihanna YouTube music video gone wildly viral since Casual Vacancy’s publication here. You can review Rowling’s comments about the importance of the song here. In brief, it’s to be understood ironically — Krystall doesn’t understand she doesn’t have an umbrella to offer anyone nor is she is likely to be offered the protection of anyone else’s when the storm comes.

Rowling says the song is “just perfect” for the book because of the rap by Jay Z, which describes a person who is “shockproof.” A girl in The Casual Vacancy uses the words, but she does not understand them.

Rowling says, “There’s this rap that Jay Z does at the beginning of the song and it’s actually a very celebratory rap. It’s saying, ‘I’m shockproof …I’m famous, I have money, let the Dow Jones fall, I’m OK,’ and it’s said in the book by a girl who doesn’t really understand the words and who is not OK. It’s very poignant to me that this girl doesn’t understand.”

Rowling’s selection of which lyrics to read is definitely not inclusive — she cites two of the song’s many verses and repeats the same ones each time to the very end.

We’ve got her thoughts about the place of this rap soundtrack into the novel. Please share your musings on this borrowed poetry device. Does it work? What is it supposed to be doing? Outside of Barry Fairbrother’s supposed bemusement, are there any other clues that the girls just don’t understand what they’re singing? Why do the girls of the Crew team insist that it be sung at the funeral?