pic: happiness-in-a-box
J. K. Rowling is starting her publicity push as her new book The Casual Vacancy
comes out on September 27, which is next Thursday.The Casual Vacancy Hardcover from Amazon
The Casual Vacancy for Kindle on Amazon
The Casual Vacancy Audo Book on Amazon
Guardian UK has an in-depth article about Rowling's views on just about everything, including the book. I find it very interesting that a book about small-town politics is timed perfectly to coincide with the elections in the U.S. right now, where the vast majority of Rowling fans happen to live. No real surprise though, LOL.
Some excerpts:
Rowling: "Obviously I need to be in some form of vehicle to have a decent idea," she laughs. Having dreamed up Potter on a train, "This time I was on a plane. And I thought: local election! And I just knew. I had that totally physical response you get to an idea that you know will work. It's a rush of adrenaline, it's chemical. I had it with Harry Potter and I had it with this. So that's how I know."
. . . "I'm interested in that drive, that rush to judgment, that is so prevalent in our society," Rowling says. "We all know that pleasurable rush that comes from condemning, and in the short term it's quite a satisfying thing to do, isn't it?" But it requires obliviousness to the horrors suffered by a family such as the Weedons, and the book satirises the ignorance of elites who assume to know what's best for everyone else."
. . . "We're a phenomenally snobby society," Rowling nods, "and it's such a rich seam. The middle class is so funny, it's the class I know best, and it's the class where you find the most pretension, so that's what makes the middle classes so funny." The book is so funny I was halfway through before noticing that every character is, to a varying degree, monstrous.
. . . Whodunnits are her literary guilty pleasure – "I love a good Dorothy L Sayers" – but then again, she doesn't really feel guilty about that: "There's no shame in a Dorothy." She hasn't read Fifty Shades Of Grey, "because I promised my editor I wouldn't." She doesn't look as if she feels she's missing out. "Not wildly," she agrees drily.
~~~
Reporter Decca Aitkenhead: I am required to sign more legal documents than would typically be involved in buying a house before I am allowed to read The Casual Vacancy, under tight security in the London offices of Little, Brown. Even the publishers have been forbidden to read it, and they relinquish the manuscript gingerly, reverently, as though handling a priceless Ming vase. Afterwards, I am instructed never to disclose the address of Rowling's Edinburgh office where the interview will take place. The mere fact of the interview is deemed so newsworthy that Le Monde dispatches a reporter to investigate how it was secured. Its prospect begins to assume the mystique of an audience with Her Majesty – except, of course, that Rowling is famously much, much richer than the Queen.
. . . When I tell her I loved the book, her arms shoot up in celebration. "Oh my God! I'm so happy! That's so amazing to hear. Thank you so much! You've made me incredibly happy. Oh my God!" Anyone listening would take her for a debut author, meeting her first ever fan.
~~~
J.K.Rowling on her personal life:
Rowling grew up near the Forest of Dean in a community not unlike Pagford. "And this was very much me vividly remembering what it was like to be a teenager, and it wasn't a particularly happy time in my life. In fact, you couldn't give me anything to make me go back to being a teenager. Never. No, I hated it."
Her mother, a school lab technician, was diagnosed with MS when Rowling was 15. "But it wasn't just that – although that did colour it a lot. I just don't think I was very good at being young."
. . . fame has had its upsides; meeting Barack Obama and the legendary Democrat speechwriter Bob Shrum were the two greatest starstruck moments of her life.
. . . Having always longed to be a writer, she now found herself in charge of a business empire stretching all the way to Hollywood, as the Harry Potter films began smashing box office records. "And it's a real bore. Should I be more diplomatic? Oh, I don't care. No, there is literally nothing on the business side that I wouldn't sacrifice in a heartbeat to have an extra couple of hours' writing. Nothing. That sounds hideously ungrateful because it's made me an awful lot of money, and I'm very grateful for that. But it's not something that interests me, and there have been lots of opportunities to do things that make more money, and I've said no."
Hmmm . . . I'll be glad to take some money and power off her hands so she can have more time to write. LOL
But what about the book? If you don't wish to see SPOILERS then skip the following excerpt from Decca Aitkenhead's synopsis:
The pompous chairman assumes the seat will go to his son, a solicitor. Pitted against him are a bitterly cold GP and a deputy headmaster crippled by irreconcilable ambivalence towards his son, an unnervingly self-possessed adolescent whose subversion takes the unusual but highly effective form of telling the truth. His preoccupation with "authenticity" develops into a fascination with the Fields and its most notorious family, the Weedons.
Terri Weedon is a prostitute, junkie and lifelong casualty of chilling abuse, struggling to stay clean to stop social services taking her three-year-old son, Robbie, into care. But methadone is a precarious substitute for heroin, and most of what passes for mothering falls to her teenage daughter, Krystal. Spirited and volatile, Krystal has known only one adult ally in her life – Barry – and his sudden death casts her dangerously adrift. When anonymous messages begin appearing on the parish council website, exposing villagers' secrets, Pagford unravels into a panic of paranoia, rage and tragedy.
Pagford will be appallingly recognisable to anyone who has ever lived in a West Country village, but its clever comedy can also be read as a parable about national politics.
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