The death of Barry Fairbrother happens at the beginning. This is the first odd-mystery thing that struck me. Reading any synopsis or description of the book, I knew that Fairbrother's death would be the impetus for pretty much every single action in the rest of the 500+ pages, but what struck me was how intensely little time was paid to the event or its cause. This death gets the wheel in motion, but not in a gotta-find-the-bad-guy-and-vindicate-stuff kind of way. It really turns the concept of mystery on its head--even though it becomes abundantly clear later on that this is the least of all the mysterious things that happen here. The other conceptual turn that I noticed was the very idea of mystery itself. In a standard mystery novel, there is one protagonist, the detective, who acts as a sort of portal for the reader, a way for us to get all the information we need, but only at the speed with which the detective accesses it. In the case of Vacancy, we, as readers and sidekicks to the omnipotent and omnipresent narrator, know all sorts of things that the characters do not know. And we get to watch those characters not know, as we pinball between families and storylines and heartaches to paint the intricate and somehow still muddled sort of society that makes up Pagford/The Fields/Yarvil and the desires and iterations involved.
In the beginning as well, there seems a sort of division of sorts, each chapter having its own character or storytelling purpose, as we are introduced to the players. Divided into seven parts, each featuring a passage from Charles Arnold-Baker's book Local Council Administration, this book has an interesting sense of itself and the way in which it gives voice to each member. Toward the end of the novel, as characters and desires get all the more mixed, so do the chapters and the perspectives, sometimes spending as little as a paragraph on one person before jetting off to another one. I liked the way this melding of disparate characters' narration echoed how intertwined they had all become as a result of this Parish Council election business.It reminded me of the little things I love to read for in tricky stories like this, the verbiage and the construction of each sentence, each person, each feeling. Rowling generally does a pretty good job of this (although sometimes I can't help but laugh and shake my head at the damn "lion in Harry's chest" image representing his desire to kiss Ginny....scratch that, I always laugh...) and I appreciate books that can trap me in the words like that.
One (rather negative, it pains me to say) review I read of this book made a note that they read this book because how could they say J.K. Rowling is one of their favorite authors with only having read a single series/world undertaken by said author? And I wholeheartedly agree. I am a loyal and avid reader, collecting an author's works like mementos, and I was excited to see things I loved about Rowling's style shine through in Vacancy. It is the quintessential test-of-mettle story, drop someone who is good at what they do into an entirely new situation and see how they fare, how they shine. While Vacancy may not have been the book I intended to read for this month's challenge, nor entirely what I expected as the next edition of J.K. Rowling-wins-the-writing-game, but I can truly say I enjoyed this book. I got sucked in, even when it was moving at its slowest, and I really recommend it.
