JK Rowling: The Casual Vacancy – review

They call it "denial marketing": the process whereby the contents of JK Rowling's books are guarded like the crown jewels until publication day. It made sense with Harry Potter, when the world and his dog wanted to know what had happened to the boy wizard and his dastardly foes. But it creates a slight anti-climax in the case of The Casual Vacancy, a novel concerning a parish council election in a small West Country town.

There are some superficial excitements here, in that the younger characters get up to things that Harry probably never dreamed of: taking drugs, swearing, self-harming, having grimy casual sex, singing along to Rihanna. The new book contains regular outbursts of four-letter words, along with the memorable phrase "that miraculously unguarded vagina" – which, leaked in a pre-publication profile, has caused a flurry of jokes on Twitter about Harry Potter and the Miraculously Unguarded Vagina.

Generally, though, The Casual Vacancy is a solid, traditional and determinedly unadventurous English novel. Set in the "pretty little town of Pagford", it is a study of provincial life, with a large cast and multiple, interlocking plots, drawing inspiration from Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot. 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. The inhabitants of Pagford – shopkeepers, window-twitchers, Daily Mail readers – are mostly hateful Muggles, more realistic versions of the Dursleys, the awful family who keep poor Harry stashed in the cupboard under the stairs. The book seems doomed to be known as Mugglemarch.

Behind its tourist-friendly façade – the hanging baskets, the war memorial, the scrubbed cottages – Pagford is of course a hot-bed of seething antagonism, rampant snobbery, sexual frustration and ill-disguised racism. The plot is set in motion when, on page five, its hero, Barry Fairbrother, falls down dead in the car park of the "smug little golf club". His death creates a "casual vacancy" on the parish council, and the forces of darkness, led by Howard Mollison, the obese delicatessen owner, see their chance to parachute in one of their own.

Barry, a man of "boundless generosity of spirit", had been the main opponent of their plan to reassign the Fields, a run-down sink estate, to the district council of the nearby city, Yarvil – thereby off-loading responsibility for its drug-addled inhabitants, and driving them out of the catchment area for Pagford's nice primary school. The election heats up when scurrilous but accurate accusations, posted by "the Ghost of Barry Fairbrother", start appearing on the council website.

The Casual Vacancy has all the satisfactions and frustrations of this kind of novel. It immerses the reader in a richly peopled, densely imagined world. Rowling has reportedly drawn on her own mildly unhappy West Country childhood, in a village outside Bristol and then later outside Chepstow. The claustrophobic horror is nicely done: everyone knowing everyone; Howard, scheming from behind his hand-baked biscuits and local cheeses. Rowling is good at teenagers, particularly boys, and unhappy couples. The book has a righteous social message, about responsibility for others, and a great big plot that runs like clockwork; like the Potter novels, it is efficiently organised beneath its busy surface.

On the other hand, the novel is very much the prisoner of its conventions. Rowling's underclass characters are not bad, considering they were put together by the richest novelist in history, but it's a pity that they all use a kind of generalised, Dickensian lower-order-speak, that belongs more to literary custom than anything anyone ever says: "I takes Robbie to the nurs'ry"; "Tha's norra fuckin' crime"; "No, shurrup, righ'?". The plot is often predictable; it requires a large helping of artificial contrivance; and it lurches into melodrama in the final act. The rules probably require this, and it all rattles along nicely enough, but it leaves a slight sense of disappointment.

No one, I suspect, reads Rowling for the beauty of her sentences but there is often a sense here that the language is not quite doing what she wants it to do. One character, we are told, "hated sudden death". Who doesn't? The metaphors regularly run away with her. One character's sexual performance was "as predictable as a Masonic handshake". What's predictable about that?

The Casual Vacancy is no masterpiece, but it's not bad at all: intelligent, workmanlike, and often funny. I could imagine it doing well without any association to the Rowling brand, perhaps creeping into the Richard and Judy Book Club, or being made into a three-part TV serial. The fanbase may find it a bit sour, as it lacks the Harry Potter books' warmth and charm; all the characters are fairly horrible or suicidally miserable or dead. But the worst you could say about it, really, is that it doesn't deserve the media frenzy surrounding it. And who nowadays thinks that merit and publicity have anything do with each other?

The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling. £20, 503pp