Il Seggio Vacante (The Casual Vacancy)

Adriano Salani Editore conferma oggi che la traduzione italiana di The Casual Vacancy arriverà nel nostro paese il prossimo 6 dicembre 2012 portus

Proprio oggi però è stata aggiornata la classifica dei bestseller stilata da USA Today e non sorprende trovare The Casual Vacancy al primo posto. Il nuovo libro di J.K. Rowling ha scavalcato il romanzo di E.L. James, Cinquanta Sfumature di Grigio, che è stato primo in classifica per ben 21 settimane. portus

Featuring grimy casual sex, self-harm, rape and heroin addiction – not to mention vicious parish politics – JK Rowling's first novel for adults represents a decisive break from her back catalogue. But if The Casual Vacancy is ambitious in its scope and themes, it is determinedly unadventurous in its style and mode. It's a book that wrestles honourably and intelligently with big moral and political questions, but does so in a slightly clunky and convention-bound way.

Rowling relies on stock situations and verbal clichés; if you're irritated by important episodes being telegraphed with phrases such as "But then came the hour that changed everything," then this is probably not the novel for you. But equally, it offers something that more stylish, highbrow fiction often doesn't or won't: a chance to lose yourself in a dense, richly-peopled world.

This is a traditional, somewhat retro English novel. Set in the "pretty little town of Pagford", in the West Country, it is a study of provincial life, with a large cast and multiple, interlocking plots, drawing inspiration from such writers as Trollope, Gaskell and, perhaps most of all, George Eliot: the tone is empathetic, but censorious and slightly didactic, using the plot to show that wickedness rebounds on both the wicked and the virtuous, leaving us all sadder and wiser at the end. The only obvious parallels with the Harry Potter books are that, like them, it focuses on teenagers, and is animated by a strong dislike of mean, unsympathetic, small-minded folk. The inhabitants of Pagford – shopkeepers, curtain-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 has already been dubbed 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. "Old Pagford", for instance, finds it hard to forgive the "brownness, cleverness and affluence" of its spiky Sikh GP. The plot is set in motion when, on the third page, its hero, Barry Fairbrother, falls down dead in the car park of the "smug little golf club"; "smug" and "complacent" are words that crop up again and again.

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 other main driver of the plot is Krystal Weedon, the teenaged daughter of a chaotic heroin addict from the Fields, outwardly aggressive but actually doing a good job of single-handedly raising her neglected little brother. Barry, who grew up in the Fields before making good and moving up the hill to Pagford, had been a sort of mentor to her. Less altruistically, Krystal is being pursued by Fats, the clever and mildly sociopathic son of the deputy headmaster and the school counsellor. He doesn't think about her much as a person; he thinks of "those splendid breasts, that miraculously unguarded vagina".

Judging by the early reviews, people are shocked that the author of Harry Potter could have written something as bleak as the Weedon family. But these sections of the book are a little too laborious and programmatic to be truly harrowing: like a detective series dutifully dealing with "social issues", it seems to come at the underclass story via what we already know from journalism, or from social workers, rather than inhabiting it from the inside. Rowling is impressively unsentimental, and has clearly done her research. But though there are some viscerally horrible touches, these passages don't feel fully alive. Perhaps that's partly because the Fields characters are handled with the tweezers of old-fashioned literary convention: whereas the others speak in rounded standard English, they use a kind of generalised, Dickensian lower-order-speak, that owes more to written convention than anything real: "I takes Robbie to the nurs'ry"; "Tha's norra fuckin' crime"; "No, shurrup, righ'?"

Personally, I found it far more convincingly bleak in its more satirical sections dealing with the attitudes of the supposedly tolerant middle-classes, and their pinched and loveless relationships.

Probably the best bits of all are those featuring teenagers, and particularly teenage boys. Fats, an adolescent existentialist ruthlessly searching for "authenticity", is a memorable character: he's made the unnerving discovery that, in his age group, being immune to embarrassment is almost like a super-power. (Rowling is said to have drawn on her own experiences growing up in genteel West Country villages, where she was reportedly moderately unhappy, listening to the Smiths and feeling desperate to escape.)

By and large, as Fay Weldon put it back in 2003, Rowling writes "readable, saleable, everyday, useful prose". But there is a persistent sense in The Casual Vacancy that the language is being strained for fine effects, and not doing quite what Rowling wants it to do. The GP, we are told, "hated sudden death", which seems an odd statement to make.

The metaphors and similes often slip away from her. One character's sexual performance is "as predictable as a Masonic handshake"; another clings on to her partner like "an aggressive and threatening barnacle"; the news of Barry's death radiates out, "halo-like", from the hospital. You can see what she's getting at in all three cases. But Masonic handshakes aren't predictable unless you happen to be a Mason – they're mysterious and faintly sinister; barnacles aren't threatening or aggressive; and haloes don't radiate outwards – they sit on saint's heads, or surround planets.

For Rowling's fanbase, this is probably beside the point. They'll be in it for the plot, which is big, engrossing, and runs like clockwork. Like the Potter novels, the book is extremely efficiently organised beneath the busy surface. True, the narrative requires a fair amount of artificial contrivance, is a little a predictable, and lurches into melodrama in the final straight – but this kind of story probably demands that. More problematic for the fans, I suspect, is that The Casual Vacancy has none of the Potter books' warmth and charm. It's a pretty sour story, in which all the characters are either fairly horrible, or suicidally miserable, or dead. Even Barry is a terrible disappointment to his wife.

People have come up with all sorts of explanations for Harry Potter's popularity with grown-up readers, from the obvious – the escapist attractions of the minutely invented fantasy world – to the grandiose: western adults are stuck in an eternal adolescence. But one of them, I suspect, is that people still enjoy reading about good people, and seeing them rewarded – something that more respectable novels seldom offer these days. If that's the case, then Rowling might see a backlash over the next few months.

Il nuovo libro di J.K. Rowling ha scavalcato il romanzo di E.L. James, Cinquanta Sfumature di Grigio,

Mi dispiace solo che non ci sia, a detta della recensione, il calore e la magia di HP, mentre mi pare di capire che ci sia molto angst ed è una cosa che apprezzo. Boh, poi vedremo.

ma è totalmente diverso da harry potter quindi ci sta che non ci sia la magia LOL XD

«Sono stato avvinto dall'incantesimo di un grande romanzo... Corposo, ambizioso, geniale, spregiudicato, divertente, spiazzante e sontuoso, è il romanzo dell'Inghilterra di oggi, arricchito di sapienza letteraria... L'opera commovente di un'autrice che comprende fino in fondo sia gli esseri umani che i romanzi.» Time

«Una lettura nitidissima ricca di grandi, memorabili personaggi e di grande impatto emotivo... Rowling riesce a catturare l'umanità in ciascuno di essi, anche quando quell'umanità non è sempre bella da vedere.» People

«Questo libro è incredibilmente acuto... Ho sottolineato intere frasi per il puro piacere di scoprire quanto deliziosamente si possano combinare insieme le singole parole della lingua inglese... ed è sinceramente commovente.» Washington Post

«Un romanzo di forza assoluta.» Wall Street Journal

«The Casual Vacancy è una vera gioia da leggere... Uno sfolgorante, geniale, avvincente come non mai, e divertentissimo affresco della società britannica di oggi.» The Mirror

«Rowling ha scritto un grande romanzo... un libro estremamente coraggioso.» The Bookseller

«Uno studio accurato della vita di provincia, con un ampio cast e molte trame che si intrecciano, che trae ispirazione da Elizabeth Gaskell e George Eliot... The Casual Vacancy immerge il lettore in un mondo densamente popolato e perfettamente immaginato... intelligente, fatto a regola d'arte e spesso divertente.» The Guardian

«The Casual Vacancy, il primo romanzo per adulti di J.K. Rowling, è a volte divertente, spesso profondamente acuto... Jane Austen ammirerebbe il modo in cui [Rowling] descrive la diffusione virale della notizia della morte di Barry in tutta Pagford.» Telegraph

«Irresistibile, patologicamente impossibile da abbandonare... The Casual Vacancy è una commedia, ma di quelle nerissime, impressa con l'acido e spalmata di pece... Rowling dimostra capacità magistrali nel tessere varie trame che risuonano contemporaneamente, senza mai intrecciarle se non di proposito. Non è un caso che sia diventata l'autrice più venduta al mondo. Sa d'istinto, fin nelle ossa, come costringere il lettore a voltare le pagine.» The Daily Beast

«Una lettura ricca di piacere... Alcune parti della vicenda sono perfettamente in linea con i romanzi di Richard Price o Dennic Lehane, o con gli episodi di The Wire.» Parade

«Rowling sa benissimo come scrivere una trama avvincente e piena di colpi di scena... È davvero una scrittrice di talento.» The Huffington Post