Part Seven or "Funeral for an END"

[mike_smith]

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Part Seven.

The last quote from Local Council Administration is about how gifts to the poor still count as charity even if they benefit the rich in the process. I won't miss these fortune cookie quotes at all.

Three Weeks Later...

So, the final fate of Howard Mollison. He recorvered from his last heart attack very well, but this time he's not so lucky. He's stuck in the hospital, still connected to machines, and feeble. I'd call him a pale shell of his former self, but Rowling describes his color as "purple", so we'll go with that. A purple shell of his former self. If he can talk, Rowling doesn't let on.

Shirley visits him daily, which kind of sucks for her because Howard's not exactly stupendous company, and besides, she's still sore about the whole adultery thing, even if she doesn't let on. Does he remember her stalling before she called for help? We don't know. He never mentions it or the EpiPen. Shirley's only real solace is when her son goes with her to the hospital, because he can do all the talking, and escort her in and out of the building, giving her a little more attention and care that she craves. But most of the time it's Samantha who goes along, or she goes alone, and she doesn't care for that so much.

On top of that, Shirley is all alone at her home. She had presumed that Miles would invite her to stay with his family during Howard's recovery, but no dice. Patricia and Melly came over once for a few days, but Shirley hates them, so I guess that's worse.

Shirley's only remaining source of comfort is empty vitriol towards everyone she blames for the incident. The Jawandas for refusing to help Howard in his hour of need. Stuart Wall and Krystal Weedon for distracting the ambulance service. Stuart Wall again, since he confessed to being "The_Ghost_of_Barry_Fairbrother", although it was actually Simon Price who posted the story about Howard's infidelity, and her own daughter Patricia who leaked it in the first place.

Ironically, the only one left in Shirley's life is Maureen, the woman Howard was cheating with. Shirley would rather visit Howard with her than go alone, and she's found a silent form of revenge in assuming Howard's half of their business, allowing her to needle Maureen about how the deli and cafe are run. The truth behind all of this is that Shirley needs Maureen in spite of her hatred. Without her, there's no one else to talk to.

They talk about the funeral for the Weedon kids, and Shirley relates how she actually saw Krystal and Fats having sex in the bushes. Maureen is taken aback by the knowledge that Shirley saw Robbie in peril and did nothing, but Shirley covers her ass by claiming she was inexplicably worried about Howard, and was too distracted to pay much attention to the boy.

Maureen suggests that at least Howard can take comfort in knowing that the Fields are surely finished now, even if he's too sick to attend the Parish Council.

For some reason, Rowling doesn't bother numbering Part Seven like the others, but we're changing over to Andrew Price now.

Final fate of Andrew Price. His family is moving to Reading, apparently, and this isn't so bad, since the Bawdens are moving back to London, and Gaia wants to hang out with him from time to time. Gaia asks Andrew if he's coming to the funeral, and he agrees just to be around her. But on his way to the service he recalls a long-forgotten memory of Krystal.

Earlier in the book, it was established that Andrew was allergic to peanuts, and the kids nicknamed him "Peanut" when he had a reaction at school when he was little. Fats had given him a marshmallow with a peanut inside of it. Only Krystal Weedon took action when he collapsed. She got help and saved Andrew's life. She would have gotten a gold star for this, except she punched Lexie Mollison the next day, cementing her reputation as a malcontent.

Andrew goes to the Wall house, where Tessa plans to go to the funeral along with Fats. Like I said, Fats has taken the fall for all of the mischief caused by "The Ghost". Andrew's still pissed about this, because that meant Tessa called his dad to apologize, and this led Simon Price to assume that Fats got his information from Andrew. So ultimately, Andrew was blamed and took a beating from his abusive dad. Maybe not as bad as it would have been if Simon had known the full extent of Andrew's involvement, but a lot worse than if Fats had kept his mouth shut. Andrew realizes that Fats truly has no idea what it's like to live beyond a stable, nuturing family.

Tessa and Colin argue over sending Fats to the funeral service. Colin thinks it's just another punishment, and while he might deserve the shame, the fact is that the others at the service would hardly want to see him there. Better for him to stay behind. Tessa reluctantly agrees, and Andrew has no complaints, since he and Fats have nothing more to discuss.

Final fate of Samantha Mollison. She decides not to go to the funeral, since she had little connection to Krystal in life. Instead, she calls her husband, and for once they're on good terms. The crisis of Howard's heart attack brought them together, I suppose. They had sex and she didn't pretend he was someone else or any other sarcastic crap. Finally, she admits that she saw Robbie Weedon the day he died, and she failed to intervene. But Miles isn't judgmental about this at all, and acknowledges that she probably assumed his mother was nearby but out of sight. This impresses her, but it doesn't ease her guilt much.

This inspires her to enter community service. She asks Miles about the Parish Council. Parminder Jawanda resigned, and Howard's on the shelf indefinitely, so now there's an opening. A casual vacanc--OH NO IT'S STARTING OVER!

Miles acknowledges that they won't want another election to fill the open seats, and Samantha suggests that she and Colin Wall could take them. What, really? If it was that simple, why didn't you do this from the beginning?

Samantha hasn't drunk a glass of wine in two weeks. Yep, now she chugs straight from the bottle! But I kid Samantha Mollison. I do. Anyway, she feels rather receptive to the arguments for the rehab clinic in the Fields. So I guess the Fields debate hasn't been settled after all.

MILES: Yeah, we'll just make my wife a councillor, and the guy I beat in the election. Because local politics is like professional wrestling apparently. And that should cover everybody--

SERPENTOR: Not quite everybody, worm!

MILES: Who the hell are you? Why did you somersault through my window?

SERPENTOR: I am Serpentor and this I command!

MILES: What do you command? That I call you Serpentor?

SERPENTOR: I bid you appoint me councillor, thereby restoring me to my rightful title!

MILES: Well, I would, but we're all full up. There were only three open spots, and I just filled them all up-- Holy shit is that?

SERPENTOR: The head of "the farmer", yes. It seems he suffered an unforntunate "accident" this morning while operating the thresher. So, you see, it appears there is a fourth vacancy after all.

MILES: Well, yeah, I guess there is at that. I'll just fill out a new form here... What's your last name, Serpentor?

SERPENTOR: ... um... Is that required?

MILES: Well, I don't suppose it's required. Let me look it up. I can probably just write "N/A".

SERPENTOR: Excellent! Rasputin himself would be pleased!

Final fate of Gav-Kay. Kay and Gaia are gonna head for the funeral when Gavin calls out of the blue. Of course he didn't know the funeral was about to start. He saw Robbie wandering unsupervised that day but has no memory of it. He had to read about his death in the paper. Ever since Mary shot him down, he's been missing Barry Fairbrother, and wishing he could have a beer with him. But he died at the top of the book, and the only other person in town he seems to know is Kay, so he calls her and asks her out for drinks OH NO IT'S STARTING OVER!

Kay hangs up on him and they head for the funeral. They probably say "Girl Power" or something like that. WHY WERE KAY AND GAVIN IN THE STUPID BOOK IN THE FIRST PLACE?!?!?!?!D:!?!

As it turns out, the paper runs a front-page piece demanding an investigation into the social services handling of the Weedon family, and Kay had to deal with that because the Weedon's social worker got sick again. She wonders if she can find work in London, and maybe it would be better to stay put...? Dammit, the book is ending . I don't care who stays or goes, but make a decision already. We're not gonna have Casual Vacancy 2 to sort these things out.

Final Fate of Fats Wall. Fats watches the funeral procession from home. After Robbie's death, he returned to his parents a broken young man. He confessed to "The Ghost" and every other dirty, low-down thing he could think of, I guess trying to cleanse his soul as much as he could. He's basically a social outcast now, but I think he's too damaged now to even care.

Final Fate of Colin Wall. He was upset with Tessa for revealing that Fats may have been the product of incest. But Tessa explains that he had been slumming for a taste of "real life" and she decided to give him some. Colin seems to bond with Fats over the guilt, shame, and worry he now bears. I suppose that was what separated them in the past. Fats cared about nothing, and he resented Colin for worrying about everything.

Final Fate of Tessa Wall. Somewhat ostracized socially. Sukhvinder had to explain the cuts on her arms to her parents, which meant revealing how Fats had bullied her, which led to Parminder being very upset with Tessa for not doing something about it long ago. Tessa also blames herself for failing to help Krystal Weedon before it was too late. And pretty much all of Fats' wrongdoing is on her head as well. Oh, and she still feels guilty for deceiving the adoption agency and coercing her husband into raising a son he wasn't prepared for.

Final Fate of Sukhvinder Jawanda. She emerged from the river a hero, basically. Everyone in the community sang her praises for her noble effort to save Robbie. For once, she was getting more attention and accolades than her siblings, and her parents don't ignore or dismiss her the way they used to.

There's a dark side to it, but it's mostly good news anyway. The scar on her leg still itches and aches [Insert Voldemort joke here.], and at night she still thinks about hauling the dead boy's weight in the river, and how she was tempted to let him go and save herself. Krystal's suicide hit her hard, but her parents got a counselor for her. She stopped cutting herself after Robbies death. Maybe it was the brush with death, or the far more severe cut she sustained in the river, or the emotional maelstrom of that day.

Not long after, Sukhvinder took it upon herself to raise money for Krystal and Robbie to have a proper funeral service in Pagford. She also went to the Fields to meet with Terri Weedon personally, to explain what they were doing and why they wanted to hold the service there. Terri agreed--as is typical for her--and she even shows up for the funeral.

Okay, quick question: Why isn't Terri in jail? Krystal assumed Terri would get in big trouble just for having heroin supplies in the house. It's been three weeks. Is she clean? What happened to Obbo? Is there any punishment in store for her? Really, though, what can society do to her that she hasn't already inflicted upon herself? They certainly can't take her kids away. Somehow I get the feeling prison would be downright cozy compared to the life she has in her own home.

The book ends with Sukhvinder feeling dissatisfied with the eulogy. The minister glosses over Krystal's actual life, favoring cliches about children dying too young and so forth. So Sukhvinder flashes back to her own memory of the rowing team at an away game. They were really nervous to be at the rival school, but Krystal lightened the mood by horsing around, mooning the other team, etc. They won medals that day, because Krystal overcame the home-ground advantage. Sukhvinder arranged for Krystals medal to be buried with her. I'd like to think someone left a pack of Rolos in Robbie's casket...

The other thing Sukhvinder arranged was for Rihanna's "Umbrella" to be played at the end of the funeral, just like they did for Barry's earlier in the book. Yeah, it was kind of funny the first time, but now it just feels empty. And that's the end.

FINAL ANALYSIS

First, the positives. I'm pretty sure I've said it before, but it bears repeating. The characters in The Casual Vacancy come across as very real. They have strengths and weaknesses that blend together to make a three-dimensional personality. In a lot of cases, the strengths and weaknesses are inseparable. Howard Mollison can't be successful without being ambitious or close-minded. Parminder Jawanda can't be determined and forceful without being spiteful. Fats Wall can't be insightful without being cruel. And so on. You can easily relate to a lot of the characters, if only partially. And the way they interact (or don't) is very realistic as well. Barry's friends barely knew Krystal Weedon, even though he was practically a surrogate father to her. Andrew Price has ties to Fats and Gaia, but Fats and Gaia barely interact for most of the story. I don't know that this is necessary, but it does enhance the realism of the work. It feels like you could drive to this place and see the characters in real life.

And there's some interesting parallels to the individual character arcs. Parminder compared Terri Weedon's drug addiction to Howard Mollison's addiction to food. Despite having little else in common, they basically followed the same path. Howard tried to get everything he wanted, only to suffer a debilitating heart attack, while Terri refused to choose between heroin and her kids and ultimately lost both. Fats bullied Sukhvinder throughout the book, but there's a connection there, too. Fats hurt others while Sukhvinder cut herself, arguably because neither of them understood true hardship or pain. Robbie's death was a reality check for them both. Fats' was profoundly shaken to have his cowardice exposed, and Sukhvinder now sees death as a tragedy instead of a release. I have to admit, it's kind of fun to mull this sort of thing over.

Now, here's why the book sucks.

First of all, it's boring as hell. Realistic characters are one thing, but realistic situations are a trickier thing. A big chunk of the book is dedicated to Samantha Mollison, who barely affects the larger plot at all. Her entire character arc is in her head. She resents her family and marriage, escapes into this teeny-bopper fantasy, drinks constantly, and Robbie's death forces her to come back to reality and act her age. She doesn't do anything. She mopes around the house, she runs an unseen lingerie store into the ground, and she plans a trip to London that never materializes. She thinks and plans, but it never amounts to anything. I strongly suspect that she's only even in the book to serve as a contrast with the less fortunate characters who don't have the luxury of growing old or complacent. She's realistic, but so is an evening spent vegging out in front of the TV. No one wants to read a novel about that. The same goes for Howard's deli/cafe, Gavin and Kay's relationship woes, and anytime Fats smokes. Seriously, Rowling has him smoke a lot. Plenty of real-life smokers go through multiple packs a day, but does anyone read a novel to experience this?

What's annoying is that there are hot spots in the book where you'd expect a lot of compelling drama to go on. The Fairbrother household just had a death in the family, but we barely hear from them at all. Gavin visits, but it's mostly an excuse to get into his empty head. Rowling teased some tension between Mary and her children, but never went anywhere with it. She tells her oldest boy to throw out the newspaper with Barry's posthumous article, because she's jealous of his political work, but he defiantly keeps it, because he wants to remember his father. There's talk of the family leaving Pagford, but that would mean leaving Barry's grave behind. An interesting dilemma, but we never find out what they decided.

And what about Simon Price and Obbo? Rowling just drops these characters altogether. Simon is deflated when he loses his job, but we don't hear from him after he plans to move and get a new one. Unless something incredible changed, he's still a wife-beater, and yet no one takes him to task for this. At the beginning of the book, Andrew Price was just itching for a chance to put his father in his place. By the end, his dad is still giving him black eyes, but that's okay beause they're moving to Reading, where he can hang out with Gaia sometimes. I guess that's realistic. In real-life men can beat their wives and abuse their children and no one ever stops it. But people read fiction to escape from that. Give us a little satisfaction. I really figured Andrew's little brother Paul might be a seething cauldron of rage, and somehow he'd get his hands on a firearm and do to his father what Andrew had only fantasized about. That would be the flavor of darkness Rowling was driving at, but it would also be a resolution of sorts. Instead, the Prices remain in their status quo, they're just moving the entire act to some other town. But at least something changed with the Price family. Obbo appears to have gotten away scot-free, even though he raped a minor. The police presumably found the drugs he left in Terri's house, but did they trace it back to him? Rowling apparently doesn't consider this worth mentioning.

It reminds me a lot of the interviews she conducted after the release of Deathly Hallows. Fans wanted to know what happened to this character or that character, and she was happy to tell them anything they wanted to know. From my vantage, this was bullshit, because if this information mattered, then it should have been included in the text. This was a seven-book series, one that introduced dozens of slimeball antagonists, but only a handful are killed or brought to justice in the actual story. If you hate Dolores Umbridge, too bad, because you'll never find out what happened to her in the books. You have to look up what Rowling said in an interview.

This reinforces my opinion that Rowling is a lousy closer. Maybe she just doesn't understand how important this is, or maybe I'm blowing it out of proportion, but you have to bring it on home. I'm not saying every story or character arc has to have a happy ending, but there needs to be some sort of conclusion where the audience can say "Yeah, that wraps that up pretty well." She got it right with Voldemort. He didn't just keel over dead, we got to see one of the fragments of his soul, withered and helpless, little more than a pain recepticle. It wasn't spelled out for us, but it was obvious that by tearing apart his soul to become immortal, Voldemort had only succeeded in making his death even more terrible than he had feared. So Rowling knows how to deliver the goods. I guess that's what makes it so frustrating when she doesn't.

Now, Howard and Shirley Mollison reflect the Voldemort treatment very well. Howard didn't die, but Rowling created a situation where death might have been preferable to the state he's in. Even if his political agenda goes through (uncertain at best), he can't enjoy it because he's laying in a hospital bed. He was never about agendas, he was about status, and it's hard to be the Big Man when you're in intensive care. In twenty-four hours, he went from throwing lavish parties for himself to barely getting two or three of his family and friends to make the trek out to see him. He may recover eventually, but he won't like the world he finds, where people have moved on and he doesn't command the respect and attention that he used to. Similarly, Shirley is denied the honor of being a Big Man's wife, or even a grieving widow. Howard's unfaithfulness has tarnished their personal relationship, and his stubborn refusal to die means she's stuck with him as he is instead of how he used to be. Where she used to be able to gossip and weild a certain influence, she's basically isolated in her home now, left to stew in her own juices.

And that's all well and good, but were these really the meanest characters in the story? At least Howard's extramarital sex was consenual. Shirley only planned to murder Howard, then quickly abandoned her vengeance when it became untenable. Meanwhile, you've got Simon Price and Obbo brutalizing women with impunity, because Rowling didn't really want to go into that any further. This was probably a conscious decision on her part, but I doubt her reasoning would impress me much.

To zoom out a little ways, I think the fundamental problem here is that this book was advertised with lines like "Pagford is a town at war with itself", and we never actually got the war. I feel like Rowling deliberately avoided any obvious conflict in order to preserve the realism of the scenario. You won't get a screaming match at the Jawanda house because that doesn't really fit how the characters would think and act. But it would have been more cathartic, wouldn't it? Sometimes it's not about being realistic. The closest we got were the parts where Parminder blew her stack in the council meeting, Colin punched Fats in the face, and Shirley decided to stick Howard with the EpiPen. Oh, and when Simon broke his toe as Andrew attempted to defend his mother. A lot more of the book should have been climactic moments like those.

Yet the climactic moments we actually got still fell flat. I wanted Parminder to tap into that rage she'd been carrying for most of the book. Colin and Fats had been getting on each other's nerves for Fats' entire life, so one blow seemed insufficient. I wanted Andrew to be so desperate for an opening that he would grab a fireplace poker and whale on Simon while he dropped his guard to cradle his injured foot. I'm not sure I wanted Shirley to actually murder Howard, but it irritates me that he cheated on her and she tried to kill him, and they both know and they both won't talk about it. There's so much more drama to be had with these characters, and Rowling seems content to punt.

This goes back to an old complaint of mine: Rowling sucks at pacing. Nothing really gets rolling in this book until about the halfway mark. It became very apparent to me that until Barry Fairbrother's funeral was concluded that nothing important was going to happen. Even then, it still took a while to set events into motion. Everything up to the first message from "The_Ghost_of_Barry_Fairbrother" was just exposition and backstory, and we really didn't need that much exposition and backstory all concentrated in the first 200 pages of the book. It's the same effect that plagued the Harry Potter series, where huge swaths of each book were devoted to pointless routines that a more competent author would have taken for granted. Harry has to buy school supplies, Harry has to arrange transportation to the school, Harry has to attend the first week of classes, Harry has to decide what to do for the Christmas Break, and only after all of that's been settled can we get down to brass tacks.

The result is the same here. Rowling wastes so much space on irrelevant details, that it feels like she has to rush the important parts before the end. I don't even understand that, because I'm pretty sure her publisher would let her write as big a book as she wants. But the solution isn't to make Casual Vacancy 200 pages longer; the solution is to ditch most of the first 200 pages, then devote more attention on the plot development that everyone came to see. Why does everything have to come together at the end of the book? Why can't Sukhvinder's scars be revealed at the midpoint, so the Jawanda family can have more time to react to it? Why can't Gavin break up with Kay at the beginning of the book? It's not like there was a huge buildup to it anyway. But no, this is all crammed together in the back one-third of the novel, where none of it is given time to breathe.

Arguably, the entire premise was flawed. I read about the book after I finished it, and Rowling was quoted as explaining that she started with the idea of Robbie Weedon wandering to his doom, and all of these adult characters would see the unsupervised tyke and make no attempt to save him. The rest of the book was designed to illustrate how that could happen, i.e. what was on the characters' minds that consumed them so utterly that they would ignore a child in danger. I find that hard to swallow. It means three-quarters of the book was just setup for a really depressing punchline. No one wants to sit through that much detail for a good story, so I'd her original idea would have demanded a flashback to keep things moving. Start with Robbie's funeral, flash back to what was going on in the days leading up to it, maybe frame it as a police investigation. At least that way the characters have to reconcile what they were thinking about with what they ought to have done instead.

So what's the moral to all of this? I think there's supposed to be one, but I can't quite grasp it. I think Rowling is trying to use the story to illustrate how society leaves too much to government programs while simultaneously refusing to support those programs. I'll try to explain what I mean.

The bulk of the story is about the welfare of the Weedon family. It starts out as an abstract political debate, but it becomes clear that the Weedon family are at the heart of the matter, and one some level, everyone involved is acting out of some personal opinion of the Weedons, good or bad. Barry Fairbrother's message was that girls like Krystal Weedon have potential, and the only way to nuture that potential is for the government to support the infrastructure that keeps her afloat. That means methadone clinics for her mother, so she can stay clean and keep the family together. That means social workers checking up on Robbie's wellbeing so Krystal can go to school instead of being his primary caregiver.

The argument against that is that these programs are a waste of money because they don't work. Krystal's mom probably isn't fit to raise her son whether she stays clean or not. They give her methadone, but she still pals around with drug dealers and helps them smuggle heroin. Krystal goes to school, but she's a lousy student in terms of both grades and behavior. What's the use? The problem with Barry's political allies is that they don't share his faith in Krystal, so they lack the fire he had for defending her welfare. There's not a lot of "rugged individualism" talk in the book, but on some level it's implied that Krystal would be better off taking matters into her own hands, and finding her own way out of her predicament, using the resources that are already available to her.

And we saw how that played out. The problem is that Krystal could only rely on compassionate individuals to a certain point. Barry Fairbrother could have helped her a lot, but he died. Her great grandmother could have given her a place to stay with Robbie, but Nana Cath died, too. She had a friend who would let her spend the night, but that was about it. Come morning, they'd give her a banana and send her on her way. And they never let her bring her baby brother along with her. Kay Bawden seemed to have some rapport with the Weedons, but she has her own family to take care of, and there's a point beyond which she simply can't be responsible. It's implied that the Weedons' usual social worker, Mattie, is incompetent, but that doesn't mean Mattie doesn't care. One way or another, there's simply only so much she can do.

The only thing Krystal has left to work with is this notion that the government will give her free housing if she gets pregnant, and she pursues that plan so doggedly that she loses the very brother she was trying to protect. Someone might have talked her out of it, or helped her find another way, or at the very least watched Robbie for a couple of hours while she did the nasty in the bushes, but it just never happened. Sukhvinder made a valiant attempt to undo Krystal's error, but it wasn't enough. And even if she had saved Robbie, what then? Krystal would just be back in the exact same precarious situation.

It's implied that Pagford's residents have a newfound compassion for the Fields, now that they've had a taste of how desperate its residents can get. Public opinion of Krystal was pretty low even after she died, but Robbie became something of a symbol of innocence lost. So maybe Pagford changes its tune, or not. We don't know. But it seems that the message here is that you can't stick your head in the sand and assume Big Government or a private benefactor will be enough to protect the Krystal Weedons of the world. Big Government is underfunded, and private benefactors are mortal. The net has holes in it, and its up to all of us to make those holes as small as we can. At least I think that's what Rowling is trying to say. I'm not sure she has any practical applications for that idea. The way I look at it, Krystal had a lot of people pulling for her, and she could have had a lot more and still self-destructed. There's no simple answer.

Well...

There's one simple answer.



RATING: BAD

G'night, everybody.