PositiveA.V. ClubWhere Harry Potter was fantastical and epic, The Casual Vacancy is mundane and doggedly narrow, obsessed with the minutiae and pettiness that can make daily life a drudgery, a lonely, isolated trudge where the only sense of triumph comes through geographical or corporeal escape ... The Casual Vacancy is chockablock with characters who exist somewhere in the space between pitiable and contemptible. They’re a sprawling network of small-minded people, among whom neither a hero nor a villain emerges ...the book’s collectivist outlook presents all its characters as victims themselves in some way or another. Their misery is either their own doing, or others’, or society at large — usually a combination of all three ... It’s all but impossible to regard The Casual Vacancy completely independent of Rowling’s previous work, but she has gone to great lengths to facilitate such an evaluation ...admirably ambitious and manages to say a great deal within its extremely narrow focus, showing the sort of deep scars that can result from even the pettiest circumstances.
