Review: The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling

I think it's fair to say a lot of people came to The Casual Vacancy determined to hate it.  Some people were going to attack it for not being Booker Prize worthy.  Others were going to loathe it for not being Harry Potter.  Many, judging by Amazon reviews, were more interested in the Kindle price than the book itself.  Motivated partly by these naysayers, and partly by my love of her earlier work, I would admit to being equally stubborn in my determination to love the book.  I wasn't disappointed.

Make no mistake, The Casual Vacancy is a strange book - at once very contemporary and deeply old-fashioned.  Only a few weeks ago I was celebrating the long-and-slow virtues of Anna Karenina, written at a time when novelists were unafraid of meandering merrily along with a big cast of characters and a slow-burning plot.  Rowling's new book is in that mould.

The Road to successful film adaptation...

(by Claire Davis)

One of the best books I have read all year has got to be The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. Stunningly written, heart-wrenchingly sad and one of the most unsettling stories I have read in my entire lifetime, its poetic language and beautifully bleak imagery left me with a very real terror at the possibilities of humanity, when the world as we know it comes to an end.

Which of course meant that the film The Road, directed by John Hillcoat, couldn't possibly match up to my expectations. Well, readers, I was actually surprised, and found myself to be wrong as I sat captivated in front of the movie version of the book last night. It was an extremely uncanny experience; as though somebody had climbed into my very own head, extracted the scenes from my imagination as I turned the pages of that book, and played them out on the big screen for me to watch. It could have been a projection of my very own perceptions. Powerful, upsetting, frightening and hauntingly (yet so paradoxically) beautiful, I was wholeheartedly impressed by the film.

Books News Digest

J.K. Rowling's forthcoming novel The Casual Vacancy had its cover released this week.  Waterstones' Jon Howells' described it as 'bold', the Guardian contrastingly labelled it 'understated', and a tastefully named Comment is Free contributor commented 'Reviewing a COVER? Oh dear.'  But what else is new in the book world this week?

Nobel Prize-winning Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez will not be able to continue writing due to dementia, his brother has announced.  Marquez, best known for works such as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, is with cruel irony midway through his two-part autobiography, entitled Living to Tell the Tale.