oh - fuck - they made this into a TV drama and I endured the first episode or two - heroic liberals saving the proles from their feckless debauchery - utter shit.
I read it and helped a GCSE student write a long project book review about it.
So a take on the men from the council estate in Fields:
Every single male associated with Krystal's family at the heart of the novel, and the Fields estate, in general, has absolutely nothing redeeming about them. A majority of male Fields adults are simply absent from any real social interaction, the implication being they are either in prison or on standard male criminal activitiy, which means they cannot return home to sleep.
Michael has violently abused his daughter Terri and presumably his whole family to the point where his mother one day abandons home with her suitcase while Terri (aged 11) is at school. The two elder daughters (Cheryl and Danielle) move out to their respective boyfriends' homes, leaving 11-year old Terri alone with her father, who then throws "a pan of burning chip fat at her. Her Human League T-shirt had caught fire".
Terri after some respite with her Nana Cath, simply returns to live alongside with Michael, who begins to sexually abuse her aswell "When Michael was not beating Terri, he was doing the other things to her, the things she could not talk about." Eventually Terri runs away from home aged 13 and is placed into social care, where in Yarvil she goes to school and becomes friends with Obbo there from the age of 15. Michael's abusive fatherhood does not stop, but continues: "After Terri had been taken into care, her father had had more kids. Nine in total, Cheryl reckoned, to five different mothers. Terri had never met her half-siblings, but Krystal had told her that Nana Cath saw them."
Terri's first partner, Ritchie Adams, dad to Krystal's step-siblings, is in prison. He has habitually stubbed out cigarettes on his one-year-old daughter's arms, and kicked her cracking her ribs and also disfigured Terri's face. For some reason, never adequately explained, the children are removed into care but Terri is left in the flat and hands of this domestic abuser for some time until he then goes on to murder someone, and is then arrested, sentenced, now serving life in Bristol.
Krystal's father, Banger, presumably has something to do with an unnamed man being found dead in the bathroom, whilst Krystal is young. (Banger is only mentioned once anyhow). "Krystal had told Tessa how, when she was six years old, she had found the corpse of an unknown young man in her mother’s bathroom. It had been the catalyst for one of her many removals into the care of her Nana Cath", Krystal's great-grandmother. We are not told exactly what happens but can guess either that Banger has been violent towards him or this figure has overdosed.
Terri's on-off boyfriend, associate, pimp and partner-in-crime (storing drugs and burglarised goods in her council flat), her friend since the age of 15 - is Obbo, the villian of the novel. He is a drug supplier for the estate, supplying Terri with heroin, even when she is continuing her methadone programme. He also stores burglarised computers and large quantities of packets of other stolen stuff in Terri's council flat. This flat is one where social workers and police regularly call ie not a safe fence house at all. Why does he do this? No information is given.
Obbo rapes Krystal in her own home, while her mum is asleep after a methadone/heroin hit. Sort of associated with him is an unnamed figure, a 'boy' ie a young adult, who works as a forklift driver but only really for the purposes of criminality deals in burglarised goods for Obbo.
Obbo is sort of simply beyond the pale. We find out nothing about his family or his home or anything else - we find out he is a rapist, a pimp, a heroin dealer to a woman and involved in burglary, but nothing more.
We are told several times that Terri's entire family, including the men, have disowned her and refused to assist her financially in any way. The only member Terri has contact with is her sister Cheryl, whose son is Dane, a hard lad in the school. Dane Tully, Krystal's cousin, also in Y11 aged 16, has beaten up a 19-year old on away turf on a rival estate with his father Shane Tully, Terri's brother-in-law, handling the three elder brothers. What were the reasons? What happened? Who cares - they fight just because that's what they do. We are simply told in two short sentences: "Tully’s family was infamous. His two older brothers and his father spent a lot of time in prison."
It's the same state of play story about Terri's life, in a council home, as a shoplifter, prostitute, fence for burglarised goods, heroin user and mother to two children. "Terri, who had remained with Ritchie until his arrest, never saw Anne-Marie or Liam [her first two children], for reasons Krystal did not entirely understand; the whole story was clotted and festering with hatred and unforgivable things said and threatened, restraining orders, lots more social workers." For some reason the omniscient narration just cuts out here as if the author cannot be bothered to detail these sordid lives. According to the narrator in a bracketed paragraph, The Wheedons' life is dependent on methadone: "without methadone, they would return again to that nightmare place where Terri became feral, when she would again start opening her broken-toothed mouth for strangers’ dicks, so she could feed her veins. And Robbie would be taken away again, and this time he might not come back."
Out of eight named males tied to Krystal's family, every single one (Banger, Obbo, Shane Tully, his son Dane Tully, Pikey Pritchard, Michael, Ritchie Adams) is a partaker in violent behaviour (wider anti-social and/or domestic violence). The only point of doubt could be Banger, Krystal's dad, who who theoretically might not be responsible for the serious manslaughter or violence that lead to the unnamed man dead in the bathroom for 6-year old Krystal to inspect. (None of this is particularly clear because we are told Krystal's mum has told her that her dad was the dead man in the bathroom, but later explains her dad is in prison in Bristol.)
Beyond the named list are her Krystal’s cousins, Dane's brothers - unnamed but violent and nasty - Pikey's brother ditto, and Obbo's unnamed burglary-related operative.
Out of the ex-Fields residents - Simon Price is a paranoid and periodically psychotic-violent-abusive man. Barry Fairbrother's brother has served time in prison, whilst Barry Fairbrother has come out as an angel - bank manager, volunteer and inspiring hero. However the strain of trying to help people from Fields is too much and he is cut dead by an aneurysm from trying too hard, thus causing the title's 'Casual Vacancy' on the local council.
Barry becomes something of a redeemer myth figure, we see him in real time for only a page until his aneurysm. From that point on, so much is written in favour of him in narration so often it's hard to imagine his actual existence. He is honest and trustworthy and a successful bank manager and engaging to Fields teenagers and young carers. He is warm and funny in general, and such a good boss that his workers attend his funeral, he is magically able to convince wavering right-wing middle-class councillors to support the Fields estate, and he is the sole tour-de-force coach and motivator behind the local school Winterdown Girls’ Rowing eight.
Tallying it up, one can only conclude all the Fields men, are basically irredeemable, morally crippled savages; except the one true Barry Fairbrother. He left a long, long time ago and became a bank manager. Barry is unlike his brother and presumably they grew up in the same circumstances.
Barry became a bank manager but his brother SImon passed through prison.
Simon Price, born and raised in the Fields estate, but living in the posh village now with a nurse wife, Ruth, is also a violent abuser - but neither wife nor the two children have taken any action at all against him. He has been on the verge of beating up a neighbour's son for damaging a shelf in his garage, held back at the last moment by the boy's mother. He regularly strikes his elder son and his wife. He is not quite as sociopathic as others on the estate, being as he left it years ago, became an apprentice printer and then print-works site manager but not senior management. (One of the lucky ones obviously somehow became trained and climbed up from the shop-floor whilst the printing industry was being decimated in the 1970s and 1980s).
His behaviour makes no sense in general, he is just out on the grasp for no good reason at all. He serially practices fraud in the Harcourt Walsh print-works, and also deals in burglarised goods only for himself, managing to associate himself with Obbo in the process, even though Obbo, we are told, is also known character as a pimp and supplier. Throughout the novel he never calls his son by his real name (Andrew) but Pizza Face because of his acne. We learn little about him beyond generalised violence and paranoia except that since he has moved out of the Fields he looks down on its inhabitants, plus one fact: he watches Match of the Day.
The deepest sentences we ever get on Simon: "passing the house in which Simon had grown up. He had not been past the place for years; his mother was dead, and he had not seen his father since he was fourteen and did not know where he was. It unsettled and depressed Simon to see his old home with one window boarded over and the grass ankle-deep. His late mother had been house proud."
Not a single male currently living on Fields has any redeeming qualities at all.
About 3 pages in I could tell it was fucking awful - the writing and the attitudes - but for some perverse reasons carried on with it. It's about - and yes these are fucking SPOILERS, I don't care, I'm saving you from a fate worse than death - a vacancy on a parish council, which gets fought over by traditional bigoted conservatives and ENLIGHTENED LIBERALS. Essentially, it's a battle between grubby people in trade and a band of solicitors, doctors and fellow travellers. At the heart of it are the conservatives wanting to sell off some land which will cut the village off from a working class estate. On the face of it, the author is on the side of the liberals and wants the estate to still be part of the village.
. I know thats a minor aside but ffs. Yeah I read an excerpt when the book was released. Total caricatures based on zero knowledge
In fact the Mail (or perhaps the Telegraph) were up in arms about the attacks it makes on the middle classes! To be fair to her, it does attack their small minded judgementalism, but in doing so reveals she has a much deeper contempt and, almost certainly, fear of the poor.
