Hogwarts Professor

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!