Warning: contains over 200 F-words, 10 mentions of heroin, and zero references to Horcruxes. Yes, to say that Miss Rowling has moved somewhat away from the sugar-coated kisses of Cho Chang and the Boy Wizard would be an understatement.  This is Harry minus the magic, with plenty of casual sex, self-harming and regular drug taking, and all embellished with profanities that put Voldemort and his naughty wizard mouth to shame. School robes are replaced by stringy thongs, turreted Hogwarts with the tripled-storied Winterdown Comprehensive, and that strange man turning up on the doorstep is less likely to be your friendly magical groundskeeper than your local drug dealer. Sorry Hagrid.

It’s a tale about the muggles, a change from the happy-go-lucky boundary of the fantasy genre and a ticket into the seedier territory of realism. And why not? After more than a decade of writing about owls and broomsticks, surely JK deserves to dabble in other genres. But the problem with The Casual Vacancy isn’t to do with the change in content, it isn’t even to do with the “miraculously unguarded vaginas” or the “the gossamer cocoon” condom. It’s to do with the generality of her characters, and the caricature of the real world that they create.

The absence of any kind of moderation is ultimately the novel’s undoing. It’s set in pretty Pagford, with Hogsmeade-esque cobbled streets, picturesque buildings and a community church. It even boasts its very own authentic twelfth-century abbey and residents can enjoy the gentle tones of undisrupted birdsong on their morning rambles. So far, so English idyll. But behind the twitching curtains and hanging baskets, Pagford-Privet Drive is nothing more than a breeding ground for bitter rivalry, sexual frustration and badly concealed racism.

Just around the corner from Pagford is the public housing project known as the Fields. It’s a sprawling estate filled with dirty terrace blocks, boarded windows and is “swamped by the offspring of scroungers”, and the plot wrestles with the question of who should have responsibility for this deprived area. And unfortunately for its residents, the main man committed to saving the Fields dies on page five.

The death of Liberal Barry Fairbrother creates a ‘casual vacancy’ on the parish council, and the brawl for who will fill this vacancy, and for the future of the Fields, begins.  From page one of Harry Potter, JK makes clear her stance on the middle classes, with the author introducing readers to a bigoted couple whose opposition to magic verges on fanatical. And this extends into the pompous characterisation in her new book, top baddie revealed as obese deli owner Howard Mollison, who dons a deerstalker – just in case readers fail to grasp how middleclass he is.  

In a sense, Rowling’s desperate attempt to leave fantasy behind her comes full circle again. Because her novel is fantasy. The Casual Vacancy may have replaced magical prowess for the more conventional skill of IT, but the events that take place in the novel are too extreme to ever be called real. Satirical of Pagford, maybe, but one gets the impression that Rowling doesn’t mean to mock the residents of the Fields or their situations when she includes prostitution, drug taking, drowning and suicide all under one title.

The only problem with approaching Pagford as drenched in snobbery and hypocrisy, is that the tone jars. It makes what is clearly meant to be a novel about the real world display less realism than the Ministry of Magic. The Fields are meant to show the ‘seamy underside’ in all its sincerity, and not be undermined with moralistic steamrolling and condemnation of dinner party chatter of its neighbouring town. It’s meant to show a neighbourhood with all its peeling cream paint, petty crime and prostitution, with individuals who are not, as Rowling says they often are, “discussed as this homogeneous mash, like porridge.”

Why then, does JK insist on serving this porridge? Any diversity in the mash is lost to the fact this book is laden with extreme stereotypes and stock situations. Krystal, for example, is one of the novel’s main driving forces. She’s rude, openly aggressive and intimidated by big words and Rowling attempts to justify why this is. But the backstory is repetitive and generic, and although her mother can remember the precise dosage of methadone she is on and not her daughter’s age, we feel too distanced from Krystal’s life to see the fiction as reality, to emphasize why she steals, why she wants to get pregnant, and why she copulates within metres of her four-year-old brother.

As one of many twenty-somethings who grew up with Harry and Co, I had graduated the scholarship of Hogwarts and demanded more. It’s easy to overlook the clunky prose, or the fact JK decides to put whole paragraphs in ellipsis (annoying), but harder to forgive the impression that Rowling is furiously rebelling from the realm of witchcraft and wizardry. Expletives feel forced, the sex scenes fictional, the grotesque too sought for and the references to Rihanna and her umbrella too try-hard. It would have been interesting for readers – and for Rowling – if The Casual Vacancy was published under a pseudonym, without Rowling’s need to reassure her readers that this is an adult novel, and without readers striving to find constant comparisons with the best-selling series of all time.

The book isn’t bad by all accounts. Once one gets passed the initial hurdle of archetypal characterisation and the painstakingly drawn out first half, the novel actually becomes quite engaging. Rowling tries to show us that vacancies exist all around, and are not confined to the ballot box: in Robbie’s cardboard boxes, in Parminder’s self-harming daughter, in Kay’s futile relationship.  Rowling highlights, albeit with an awful sadness, that gulfs are ever present in everyone’s shared experiences, and that every human being is tied together by their own mortality. The casual vacancy is a vacancy that cannot be filled by the wave of a magic wand. There is no magic, no spell to make the pitiless stockpile situations go away, no Dobby to come and accio the bad. It is ruthless and it is terribly clichéd, but it is well worth a read.

‘Old English was not useful. It was entertaining though, in a morbid sort of way. Vocational degrees are of limited use anyway. We are human beings, not machines. It doesn’t matter what you study as long as your mind starts to work. I can’t help thinking that the zombie craze is because we educate people to be as dead as possible while still alive.

Working class students need people like me to talk to them and to go into their schools. Oxford could do a lot better with its time and money if it asked those of us who understand the problem first hand to get involved. Also, there is no point pretending that when students from difficult or disadvantaged back-grounds arrive at Oxford, they will just fit in.

The first term is crucial and help should be there. Oxford’s breakdown and suicide rate is shameful. Many more students suffer terrible personal difficulties – and these difficulties are compounded if you feel like you are ‘wrong’ in some fundamental way. Whenever I couldn’t cope, my horrible tutor asked me if I would be more comfortable at Aberystwyth.

I help to pay for my godchildren to attend private schools – one is at City of London, the other at Westminster. I see what a good school does for a child. They love school and they are confident, happy girls. How different for a child from some dump up north, like me.

It is good that Michael Moritz has given £300 million to Oxford for scholarships for poor students . Let’s not waste that money, but let’s not pretend that Oxford is for everyone; it isn’t.

Oxford is not and never will be an equal environment. Life is not an equal environment. What we have to do is address real problems of education and achievement and access lower down the food chain in the school system.

Catz was genuinely mixed and pretty democratic, but on my first day my tutor turned to me and said, “You are the working class experiment.” Then he turned to the young woman who was to become, and has remained, my closest friend, and he said, “You are the black experiment.” That is why I help to put her girls, my godchildren, through private school.

Interestingly, I wrote about this in the Catz Yearbook just recently, and they refused to print it. It is a long time since I have had an article rejected.

Our tutor was a dreadful man; refused to teach girls because of his malevolent homosexuality and made the lives of the boys quite a challenge. I am glad to say that he is dead.

On Feminism and female characters

We have to keep reinventing the wheel. When I studied English we were told that there were only four women novelists worth reading: the Brontës, George Eliot and Jane Austen. Virginia Woolf was not taught. When I was a kid in Accrington, I more or less taught myself by going into the library and making my way along the shelves of English Literature A-Z. This story is in Why be Happy? I did notice that most of the books were written by men, but it wasn’t until I got to N that I felt let down: Nabokov. I wondered why he hated the mature female body so much, why he was so vile about women. It does matter – style or no style.

I write for everyone. Women do write for everyone, but there is still an assumption that only men write for everyone. You will have noticed that men don’t really read women if they can get away with not doing so.

I write strong women characters. Of course I do. I want to challenge every status quo. There is no point being a writer if you are not prepared to take risks. I believe that literature makes us better human beings – and that being able to read deeply is itself a challenge to sound bite culture and the three-minute attention span.

As a writer, I am not here to make things easier; I am here to fight back. I believe in the political and moral purpose of art. This isn’t about propaganda – it’s about what it means to be human, the societies we try to create, the life of the mind, the primacy of imagination, the refusal of money and power as dominant values. The refusal of patriarchy as a natural or normal template for social organisation.

Everything about society is propositional. The way we organise ourselves is actually a choice, not a law like gravity. This is worth remembering most mornings.

My own characters? The Dog Woman in Sexing the Cherry – first woman in literature to make filth into a fashion accessory. Villanelle, the cross-dressing croupier in The Passion. And myself, of course, because I am a character in my own fiction. How could it be otherwise?

If I could be a woman in someone else’s fiction I’d choose to be Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. How irresistible to cross time and gender all at once. My friend, the American writer A. M. Homes, prefers to write from a male point of view. I don’t. Sometimes I prefer not to make it clear what the gender of the narrator is. We have so many assumptions about gender. Fiction is one way of challenging those assumptions.

As for feminism being coffined? Are you mad? 50% of women in the Arab world are illiterate. Are we so smug as to think that feminism is about clever girls from Oxford and London? We have more choices, more opportunities, but women do not earn as much as men do, or make it to the boardroom. And look at the Cameron Cabinet.

Childcare should not be the reason for the scarcity of women at higher levels of power and pay. Childcare shouldn’t be a woman’s problem – it is a family issue. A child has a fa- ther as well as a mother. And all of us in the 21st century should be talking about what family means now, what heterosexuality means now, and how we can remake society so that it actually works for families and not against them.

And don’t you want to see an end to body hatred? Why should young women be made to think about their bums, tits, weight, hair, clothes, shoes, ALL the time? The misogyny of advertising needs urgent address. As does the fashion industry. The West’s biggest export right now is body hatred. China is the fastest growing market for plastic surgery – and for women under 30. Is this what we want? Don’t you want to change it? That’s feminism, girls. Caitlin Moran is GREAT. I loved How To Be A Woman.

On Autobiography

Not a useful word. Authenticity is the only word that matters in art. Creative work is a lie detector. There are no shortcuts or cheats. Crazy or sane is not relevant; truth is relevant. The truth of art is complex, always challenging. That is not to say there isn’t delight and humour and pleasure. Creativity isn’t either/ or: it’s everything. The richness and contradiction of life is magnified in art. Above all, art is a place to feel. This isn’t a hiding place; it’s a place of discovery.

I do not believe in false oppositions of imagination versus experience, or experiment versus realism. Maybe that works for critics and academics, but creativity is not about binaries. This is the work of your soul – and if that is an old-fashioned word, too bad.

Anyway, Why be Happy isn’t an autobiography. It isn’t a memoir either. It is an experiment with experience.

So I wrote Oranges when I was 25 and Why be Happy when I was 52. Maybe I like inverting numbers.

On The Daylight Gate

This was a bit of a dare in that it was suggested to me by Simon Oakes who owns the Hammer outfit and who decided to augment the sexy movie part of the empire with a sober sister (not much money) and revitalise the Hammer imprint. Random House agreed to publish these new novellas. Simon suggested I write something about the Pendle Witch Trials of 1612, because I was brought up in the shadow of Pendle Hill. I thought, ‘Why not?’ I am high- minded but not precious.

I am interested in genre writing. No, I am interested in everything – what is life for, otherwise? So I decided to give it a go. And writing a page-turner is hard work. I am not plot- driven, so this was a specific challenge. I think it worked.

What next?

Well, with reservations, trepidation, excitement, and interest I am taking over from Martin Amis and Colm Toibin and going to Manchester as Professor of Creative Writing for a couple of years.

It isn’t an everyday job by any means. I will teach once a week for one term a year and put on a few events and be an ambassador for the course. Let’s see how it works out. I have only signed for two years. And I am starting a new book and getting heavily involved in new digital platforms. Follow me on Twitter@ Wintersonworld and check out my website jeanettewinterson.com’

Converge are an enigma. In a hardcore scene dominated by a DIY mentality that results in a maximum of two albums, a number of fans which – if you’re lucky – finds its way into triple figures, and an ultimate legacy consisting of a dozen frayed t-shirts on ebay, the band has managed to make ferocious and kinetic bursts of noise for the last twenty-two years. All We Love We Leave Behind proves, to use a cliche which suits the band’s music, that Converge show absolutely no signs of slowing down.

Don’t let the stereotypically emo title fool you. This is an album which would most likely turn your average thirteen-year-old Fall Out Boy fan into a quivering wreck thirty seconds into blistering opener, ‘Aimless Arrow’. No jock-masquerading-as-geek tween angst here. This album was made for one purpose only: to kick the shit out of you. That is not to say that the four self-proclaimed “hardcore kids using leftover Slayer riffs” are not musically adept. Tracks such as ‘Shame in the Way’ show a mastery of technical guitar work and fascinatingly weird time signatures that King Kerry and co. could only dream of.

‘Veins and Veils’ sees Jacob Bannon’s Poe-esque lyrical prowess reach dizzy new heights, and the treble-heavy thrash riffs and crushing beatdowns of ‘Sadness Comes Home’ and ‘Empty on the Inside’ display the level to which Converge reconcile their two principle influences of punk and metal in order to create a visceral and exciting sound.

All We Love We Leave Behind may not be the most accessible album and is possibly not the best place to start for those new to heavier genres of music, but it is a dazzling slice of musical ability and creativity which shows that the band’s title as the ‘kings of hardcore’ is as valid now as it has ever been.

FOUR STARS

The beginning of ‘Amy aka Spent Gladiator 1’, opener to Transcendental Youth, sounds unnervingly like the Scissor Sisters’ ‘Take Your Mama’. The gut wrenches. Is this the end? After 18 years and 14 albums, have John Darnielle and his band of not-so-merry-men gone chart-friendly? No, thank gawd, no; a mere ten seconds later, the listener is whisked back to familiarly Mountain-ous terrain. Any fears of the contrary are almost immediately silenced by insights into lead singer Darnielle’s stereotypically obstinate outlook: ‘I hide out in my corner/Because I like my corner’.

Much of The Mountain Goats’ beauty has always stemmed from Darnielle’s lyricism, which, although plainly-sung and succinct is firmly rooted in the conceptual. Tropes of depression, paranoia, rebirth and affirmation find themselves played out through vignettes inhabited by Darnielle’s usual suspects, outcasts, junkies and have-nots – but the poetry here finds itself in more upbeat territory, and bolstered by a stronger emphasis on musicality than has been present in earlier albums. The music adds clout and dynamism to its lyrics, rather than merely acting as a backdrop. Perhaps most notable is the introduction of a horn section, arranged by avant-garde composer Matthew E. White, which helps to connect song and narrative voice and reinforce what few kernels of hope there are to be found in Darnielle’s bleak imagery.

The current single and album highlight ‘Cry for Judas’, sees the added horn section hinting at Neutral Milk Hotel’s seminal In the Aeroplane Over the Sea – which can surely only ever be a Good Thing. In short, The Mountain Goats have done it again. Listen to this album, and be safe in the knowledge that, at this rate, there’ll be more soon.

FOUR STARS