Guardian News and Media/London


J K Rowling’s first novel for adults, The Casual Vacancy, draws on her own experience of living on the margins of society and satirises a political landscape in which the poor are regularly cast “as this homogeneous mash, like porridge”, according to a rare interview in the Guardian’s Weekend magazine.
Rowling, who donated £1mn to the Labour party in 2008 and has previously spoken of her indebtedness to the welfare state, began writing The Casual Vacancy five years ago under the last Labour government but believes the novel has “become maybe more relevant as I’ve written”.
Speaking to the Guardian’s Decca Aikenhead, she described what she saw as “a horribly familiar change of atmosphere” since the 2010 election.
“It feels to me a lot like it did in the early 90s, where there’s been a bit of redistribution of benefits and suddenly lone-parent families are that little bit worse off,” she said.
“But it’s not a ‘little bit’ when you’re in that situation. Even a tenner a week can make such a vast, vast difference.”
The idea for the novel, her first since the 2007 publication of the final volume in the Harry Potter series that made her a global household name and the world’s first author to become a billionaire solely through her writing, came to her on an aeroplane.
“I thought: local election! And I just knew. I had that totally physical response you get to an idea that you know will work. It’s a rush of adrenaline, it’s chemical. I had it with Harry Potter and I had it with this.”
Set in the fictional West Country village of Pagford, which bears a passing resemblance to Rowling’s own childhood home in the Forest of Dean, and telling the story of a parish election triggered by the death of councillor Barry Fairbrother, The Casual Vacancy investigates the agendas and infighting that fuel local politics, and the class divisions that rive even the most picturesque English communities.
The election ultimately turns on the fate of Pagford’s grotty council estate, the Fields, embodied in The Casual Vacancy by the wretched, wrung-out Weedon family: mother Terri, struggling to kick her drug addiction, three-year-old son Robbie, under threat of social care, and teenage daughter Krystal.
“So many people, certainly people who sit around the cabinet table, say: ‘Well, it worked for me’ or ‘This is how my father managed it’,” Rowling said.
“The idea that other people might have had such a different life experience that their choices and beliefs and behaviours would be completely different seems to escape a lot of otherwise intelligent people. The poor are discussed as this homogeneous mash, like porridge. They talk about feckless teenage mothers looking for a council flat. Well, how tragic is it that that’s what someone regards as the height of security or safety?”
Rowling’s own experience of poverty - writing the first Harry Potter novel in Edinburgh cafes while she and her daughter survived on state benefits - and her emergence from it are now the stuff of literary legend.
Expectations of the novel, which will go on sale at 8am on Thursday, are running extremely high. The Casual Vacancy has featured on the amazon.co.uk bestseller list since the announcement of publication “on the strength of pre-orders alone”, according to a spokesman.