Latest from JKR: Casual Vacancy

Copies of JK Rowling's 'Casual Vacancy' were printed in Manipal

MANGALORE: The much-touted and awaited book release of this year - JK Rowling's " The Casual Vacancy" has a desi contribution to it. The book released globally on September 27 saw unprecedented levels of secrecy in printing and distribution with more than a million copies pre-ordered. The global publishers of the book handpicked only three printers globally for this release and Manipal Technologies Ltd is one of them.

LONDON: Celebrated author J K Rowling, whose latest book has a Sikh family at the heart of a fictional village in south-west England called Pagford, says she did a "vast amount of research" on Sikhism and it shows in the book titled 'The Casual Vacancy.'

Answering questions from journalists and others at a book-reading event at the Southbank Centre here last night, Rowling, 47, said that when she was in her mid-twenties she knew a Sikh woman who sparked her interest in Sikhism.

It remained with her all along, so the only non-white family in the book "had to be Sikhs", she said.

Rowling said she was particularly struck by the egalitarian principles of the religion, and wove in a Sikh family as one of the central features of the book published by Little, Brown Book Group.

"I wanted the Sikh family at the heart of Pagford, and I wanted them to be second generation Britons. So they are insiders and outsiders simultaneously. In the book, it is Sikhism that provides religious morality, not the Church of England, which is represented by an empty church," Rowling said.

Early Indian-origin readers of the book released yesterday morning said they were impressed by the way the Sikh family and Sikhism had been treated in the book.

The book devotes considerable attention to Guru Nanak, Guru Granth Sahib, khalsa, and the "night-time prayer, kirtan sohila."

London-based media consultant Mimmy Jain, who grew up in Punjab, told : "I was happily surprised to find that J K Rowling had done her research pretty well. There are no Hindu-Muslim or North-South name mismatches of the kind that make me shudder in the work of most Western authors who want to add a bit of curry to their books."

She added: "I liked her treatment of Sukhwinder, the only one in a high achieving family who is stuck because she is dyslexic.

Of course, it's the parts about the kids -- all of them -- that really stand out in the book."

The book has received mixed early reviews, while the jury is out whether Rowling has succeeded in switching from the literary genre of children books to a novel explicitly marketed as one for adults.

She said she welcomed legitimate criticism, but it all "depends on who is writing the reviews."

The book contains several expletives that Rowling read out at the second reading at the packed Southbank event.

She described the book as a tragic comedy.

Rowling, whose latest novel has been written with a Sikh family at the heart of its plot, has a character, Fats, describing his classmate Sukhvinder as "mustachioed, yet large-mammaried, scientists remain baffled by the contradictions of the hairy man-woman" on page 120. While describing Rowling's choice of words as "a slur on the Sikh community and provocative", SGPC chief Avtar Singh Makkar said the author must apologize or remove the text from her book in India or face action.

"Even if the author had chosen to describe the female Sikh character's physical traits, there was no need for her to use provocative language, questioning her gender. This is condemnable," said Makkar. He refused to say what action the body was planning. A paragraph before the Sikh student's physical description reads even more slanderous, "'The great hermaphrodite sits quiet and still,' murmured Fats, his eyes fixed on the back of Sukhvinder's head."

Social media incident involving American Sikh girl

The controversy comes close on the heels of an incident involving an American Sikh student Balpreet Kaur, who was mocked for her sideburns and a beard after her pictures were posted on a social networking site, Reditt. Kaur, a neuroscience student, had said: "Yes, I realize that my gender is often confused and I look different than most women. However, baptized Sikhs believe in the sacredness of this body — it's a gift that has been given to us by the divine being (which is genderless, actually) and, must keep it intact as a submission to the divine will." She had written this back on the thread on the site.

Rowling, while launching her book on Thursday, said that she had admitted to using ample research on Sikh religion. She said she had been deeply influenced by Sikhism because of its stress on gender equality. "It's an amazing religion. My interest was sparked years ago when I was still in my 20s — and a girl I worked with briefly came from a Sikh family."

It can't be easy to be JK Rowling and live up to the frenzy that seven record-shattering books and films have stirred. The first bunch of reviews of J K Rowling's The Casual Vacancy, therefore, don't immediately pounce on the Harry Potter author's first 'adult book', probably out of sheer respect for the times she had kept the kids, their college-going neighbours and every third person in the world hooked to a book, and not a mobile phone.

Michiko Kakutani writes in the New York Times, "It's easy to understand why Ms. Rowling wanted to try something totally different after spending a decade and a half inventing and complicating the fantasy world that Harry and company inhabited, and one can only admire her gumption in facing up to the overwhelming expectations created by the global phenomenon that was Harry Potter."

But then in The Casual Vacancy, we meet drug dealers, rapists, prostitutes and suicidal teenagers. And it doesn't take long for the disappointment to show.

As more reviews come in, her first 'adult' novel doesn't seem to have left the readers raving like Potter and his Hogwarts mates did.

One of the reasons why The Casual Vacancy sits uneasily on the minds of the readers is probably the overreaching memories of the Potter books – the lyrical language, the quaint-ified names, and the world that's strangely real and unreal at the same time. Reason why Allison Pearson writes in The Telegraph:

And so, from the pen that brought you The Leaky Cauldron comes this: "His knuckles in her belly as he undid his own flies – she tried to scream and he smacked her across the face – the smell of him was thick in her nostrils as he growled in her ear, 'F—–' shout and I'll cut yer.'" So much for Hermione Granger.

No wonder she finds The Casual Vacancy so 'howlingly bleak' that the book makes 'Thomas Hardy look like PG Wodehouse' to her.

Easily, Harry Potter was also the triumph of tangible character writing that made a work of fantasy fiction so utterly relatable. Something, that critics seem to have found wanting in Rowling's new book.

David Ulin says in the LA Times, that the men in the novel seem to be pathologically weak, cowering and despicable – something he finds hard to relate to. "These men are despised by their children, but they are portrayed so two-dimensionally that we never feel much is at stake," he says in his review.

And to top it all, while The Casual Vacancy seems to have failed to weave a Potter-worthy magic, some critics have found jarring similarities in narrative, applied to two absolutely disparate genres. Monica Hesse writes in the Washington Post:

Rowling's signature moves are still there on every page. Just as her boy-wizard series opened with an archly winking look at the upending of the Dursley family's boring lives, "The Casual Vacancy" does the same with a town. One man suffers an untimely death, the gossip mill churns, and Rowling offers the twinkly observation, "It was all immensely exciting.

Rowling, surely needs some magic to make this one work!

Source: Firstpost.com