With the amount of scrutiny surrounding J.K. Rowling’s first post-Harry Potter-series novel—a decidedly adult novel at that—it’s understandable that Rowling would want to distance the project as much as possible from her previous one, and from all the unfair comparisons it invites. And The Casual Vacancy succeeds wildly in that regard, positioning itself at the complete opposite end of the X and Y axes from Rowling’s landmark series: Where 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. There’s nothing here to titillate or satiate Harry Potter fans looking for even the tiniest fix, except perhaps a glimpse of the dreary, picayune world that twisted Harry’s contemptible Muggle—that is, non-magical—relatives, the Dursleys, into some of the series’ most pitiable figures.
