Breaking the spell: Can JK Rowling cast Harry Potter aside?

- Published on Saturday 15 September 2012

Rowling wants her new book to stand on its own merit. Picture: TSPL

CAN JK Rowling work her magic with adult fiction or will the change of genre prove a curse for the Harry Potter creator, asks Dani Garavelli

IT IS being launched amidst the kind of secrecy that might surround a missile strike on foreign soil. At 8am on 27 September, The Casual ­Vacancy, JK Rowling’s first book for adults, will go on sale with booksellers possessing little more information on what’s inside than the 137-word blurb publishers Little, Brown released in April.

Expectation has been building for months – some branches of Waterstones have been promoting the book since spring; several parodies have been spawned and fan-dom website Hypable has been drip-feeding followers whatever tidbits of information it can lay its hands on. But all anyone knows for certain about the new work is that it’s a 512-page darkly comic novel in which a ­sudden vacancy on a parish council ­reveals undercurrents of animosity in a village. Is it biting social satire or cosy crime? No-one will say. The cover, a gaudy red and yellow with an X in a ballot paper box, yields no clues beyond the obvious, that the author is trying to put as much distance between herself and Harry Potter as possible. And those few lucky enough to secure review copies have had to sign up to what has been dubbed a “super-embargo” – a confidentiality agreement which forbids anyone who signs it from revealing its very existence.
The unusual (some might say defensive) marketing strategy is a reminder of just how much is at stake for Rowling, creator of the biggest franchise in the history of children’s literature. Worth £560 million, there is no financial imperative for her to keep on writing never mind experiment with a new genre. She must know the omens are not good. Author of the Twilight series Stephanie Meyer’s sales took a dive when she moved into adult fiction. Her sci-fi novel The Host sold a total of 2 million in hardback (where the fourth Twilight novel sold 1.3 million copies on its first day). And no one doubts there will be banks of ­critics – irritated by the scale of Rowling’s fame – who have already set themselves against her latest enterprise.
“It’s a very brave move – hats off to her,” says Glasgow-based crime writer Denise Mina. “The easiest thing for her to do would be to stop writing. Writing’s really hard. Maybe once a day you think, ‘Why am I trying to do this?’ And most of us can say, ‘Well, I bought that boat’. But she has no need to keep doing it.”
The news that Rowling’s editor at ­Little, Brown would be David Shelley, who has a track record in editing crime authors, has led many to conclude The Casual Vacancy is a mystery in the ­spirit of Poirot or Midsomer Murders. This has brought a negative reaction from some who view the genre as old-fashioned and effete. However Mina believes Rowling could well have tapped into the zeitgeist. “I think we are going to see a big upsurge in cosy crime,” she says. “People think it’s irrelevant, but they forget it is actually is a microcosm of a bigger statement in a small setting. In these really sinister times of Hillsborough and Leveson and police corruption, I don’t know how much more [urban noir] people can take. People don’t read crime to find out the truth about the world – they read it for escape.”
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