Rowling's savage attack on the middle class

JK Rowling goes after middle England with her new book.

Are you tempted to read JK Rowling's The Casual Vacancy? Me neither sounds a bit grim. As Theo Tait put it in The Guardian, "people still enjoy reading about good people, and seeing them rewarded something that more respectable novels seldom offer these days".

In The Casual Vacancy, according to Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph, Rowling characterises life in the small fictional West Country town of Pagford with "500 pages of swearing, rape, drug abuse, suicide, drowning, self-harm, pseudonymous internet denunciations, domestic violence, acne and meetings of the parish council". The novel is a savage attack on the middle classes: Rowling says she detests snobbery and wishes to expose it.

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