JK Rowling’s first post-Potter novel was seen as a crucial test. Could she address the adult market? How would a decade spent as a member of the super-rich affect her writing? Whatever readers were expecting, it wasn’t The Casual Vacancy, a tale of politicking on a parish council with not a trace of magic. In scope, themes and setting it resembled Middlemarch, though it was generally the socially disadvantaged who merited Rowling’s compassion.
Now the novel comes to the small screen, in a much-anticipated adaptation, with a star-laden cast including Michael Gambon, Keeley Hawes and Simon McBurney. Rowling’s fictional town of Pagford is given a honeyed-stone, Farrow & Ball gloss – the opening sequence of the first episode seems gilded compared with the image I conceived when reading the novel, but then bins, a skip, graffiti and vandalism serve as a reassurance that Rowling’s realist vision is intact.
Or is it? The grim but appropriate ending has apparently been softened for TV, to give viewers a hint of redemption. But the hardness of her characters remains. Rowling’s allegiance is always to the young and put-upon, however vicious their tongues. Abigail Lawrie is a ferocious Krystal, Rowling’s screwed-up answer to Dorothea Brooke. For the nicest character, there’s a shock in store. The weariness creasing the face of Rory Kinnear (playing the councillor Barry Fairbrother) lends tomorrow’s episode a rather melancholic air.
One of the best things about the TV series might well be that it distances the work from its author’s inordinate fame. Watching Kinnear, Gambon, Hawes and McBurney do their glorious thing, I forgot the name JK Rowling altogether.
• The Casual Vacancy begins on 15 February at 9pm on BBC1.
