I loved this book. I'm not sure why it's gotten so many negative reviews. I do know that Rowling said she wouldn't be surprised if Americans didn't like it because "it's a very British book." Well, with all due respect to the author, I beg to differ. Yes, in some ways, it is very British. There were definitely times when I wanted to enjoy a good cup of tea with this book (and there were times when I did) but I don't think of this as a book about England, or about small towns. I think of it as a book about people.
Magic and flying brooms weren't the only things that drew us in to Harry Potter: we fell in love with the characters. Rowling is excellent at building characters and she is in top form here. These characters come right off the page and, while there are some that I loved, there were also some that I truly, deeply loathed. However, even the characters I hated had redeeming qualities and the characters I liked had flaws. There were definitely times when I was thinking "OK, I love you, but you're being a total douche right now!" and, in some cases, I could even completely understand and relate to their douchiness (see angsty teenagers). Not to say that that put them in the right, it just helped to make them very real for me.
The one real problem I had with the book was her point-of-view (POV) switching. In Harry Potter she wrote in third-person limited almost exclusively and, for the most part, I think that worked really well. There are times when I would have liked to see scenes that Harry wasn't around for but, overall, I think she used that particular POV very effectively. In The Casual Vacancy, Rowling switches from one character's head to another indiscriminately. While I think she makes the switches well, she does it too often - frequently multiple times on a single page. While I enjoyed getting a look at every character's innermost thoughts and, while that helped immensely with her awesome character development it definitely got confusing. There were several times when I had to stop and back-track in order to regain my bearings in terms of which character was being discussed in which paragraphs.
Although the book takes place in a small English town and the politics are British politics, there were several political discussions which I think could have been had (and probably have been had) in America almost word-for-word. Only the names of the town and a particular clinic would need to be changed (and those are fictitious anyway). I think Rowling has underestimated, not only how similar British and American politics are (we did, after all, base our government on theirs, when we were breaking away from them and had little else to go off of) but I think she also underestimates her own abilities in writing a work that's so inherently human. It's about people dealing with grief, and life; fear, and power struggles of all sorts (however insignificant they may be in the grand scheme of things) and all of those things are pretty universal.
No comments:
Post a Comment