JK Rowling talks to Decca Aitkenhead about her new novel, The Casual Vacancy Link to this video Featuring grimy casual sex, self-harm, rape and heroin addiction -- not to mention vicious parish politics -- JK Rowling's first novel for adults represents a decisive break from her back catalogue. But if The Casual Vacancy is ambitious in its scope and themes, it is determinedly unadventurous in its style and mode. It's a book that wrestles honourably and intelligently with big moral and political questions, but does so in a slightly clunky and convention-bound way. Rowling relies on stock situations and verbal clichs; if you're irritated by important episodes being telegraphed with phrases such as "But then came the hour that changed everything," then this is probably not the novel for you. But equally, it offers something that more stylish, highbrow fiction often doesn't or won't: a chance to lose yourself in a dense, richly-peopled world. This is a traditional, somewhat retro English novel. Set in the "pretty little town of Pagford", in the West Country, it is a study of provincial life, with a large cast and multiple, interlocking plots, drawing inspiration from such writers as Trollope, Gaskell and, perhaps most of all, George Eliot: the tone is empathetic, but censorious and slightly didactic, using the plot to show that wickedness rebounds on both the wicked and the virtuous, leaving us all sadder and wiser at the end. The only obvious parallels with the Harry Potter books are that, like them,