What If The People In Pagford Were Happy and Kind?

`Naturalist writers would be out of the job.

I have come very late to the party in reading JK Rowling’s first grown-up novel, ‘The Casual Vacancy’, published more than a decade ago and later adapted into a BBC drama series. I didn’t expect much of it, but I was pleasantly surprised. In fact, I thought it was terrific in its penetration into the hearts of the many deftly drawn characters lodged within a well designed and convincing plot. Rowling is not far off being a genius in her artistic range.

The set up was not an original one - the darkness lying behind the bland facades of ordinary small town England, an area explored by many before her, including Alan Ayckbourn, Mike Leigh and David Nobbs, to name but just a few. In this case it was a fictional town called Pagford but it could have depicted any of a large number of small, bucolic places.

But much as I loved it, something troubled me about the novel, There was a kind of subtle snobbery about the whole thing ( although it was written with a certain degree of affection). ‘Normal people’ - or so the characters would have styled themselves - were in reality torn apart by envy, fear, rivalry, ambition and desire.