Rowling’s raunchy novel a brave post-potter step
IN LONDON HARRY POTTER author JK Rowling says she has moved on from her 400 million-selling boy wizard cultural phenomenon as she launched her first novel for adults, The Casual Vacancy, at London’s Southbank Centre.
The book’s passages of sex, violence and drugs are a far cry from Rowling’s children’s fantasy novels.
And the English author warned an audience of 900 fans yesterday: ‘‘This isn’t Harry, Ron and Hermione. These are very different teenagers – these are contemporary teenagers.’’
She said the realistic novel did not have the constraints of fantasy that the Potter series had, and the billionaire made no apology for her grim portrayal of the ugly attitudes of small town life.
She added that: ‘‘I am honest in this book’’, and that she had used her experiences of growing up in a similar place and of her time as a teacher and as a former single mother.
Rowling has suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder as a teenager, a characteristic she gave one of the adult characters in the new book.
After criticism of bad language used in the Little, Brown-published book, she admitted: ‘‘It’s true I swear’’, in her conversation with broadcaster Mark Lawson. In one of her two readings from the book that came between questions, she read a passage in which main character Krystal swore liberally, adding: ‘‘To depict Krystal without having Krystal swear would just be ludicrous’’.
The character, she explained, is an ‘‘ignorant, promiscuous, intermittently violent’’ teenager, and ‘‘was not dissimilar’’ to girls she went to school with in western England 30 years ago.
Rowling famously had the idea for the Potter series on a train when a penniless single mother living in Scotland in the early 1990s. She said this novel came to her on a plane, and she joked that with her upward mobility her next big idea might be on a space shuttle.
The 47-year-old also revealed she wrote more than one adult novel before embarking on the Potter series 15 years ago. She also has a half-finished children’s book on the go, she said.
Rowling had yet to read reviews of the book, other than one in the Rightwing UK newspaper The Daily Mail, which criticised it as ‘‘a 500-page socialist manifesto’’.
Audience members said they trusted Rowling to make the move into adult themes, and praised her as a storyteller second to none. Benedict Flett, 16, said: ‘‘I grew up with Harry and this is the next logical step. The Potter generation will love the direct style of description but above all, the storytelling.’’
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