faintly sinister; barnacles aren't threatening or aggressive; and haloes don't radiate outwards -- they sit on saint's heads, or surround planets. For Rowling's fanbase, this is probably beside the point. They'll be in it for the plot, which is big, engrossing, and runs like clockwork. Like the Potter novels, the book is extremely efficiently organised beneath the busy surface. True, the narrative requires a fair amount of artificial contrivance, is a little a predictable, and lurches into melodrama in the final straight -- but this kind of story probably demands that. More problematic for the fans, I suspect, is that The Casual Vacancy has none of the Potter books' warmth and charm. It's a pretty sour story, in which all the characters are either fairly horrible, or suicidally miserable, or dead. Even Barry is a terrible disappointment to his wife. People have come up with all sorts of explanations for Harry Potter's popularity with grown-up readers, from the obvious -- the escapist attractions of the minutely invented fantasy world -- to the grandiose: western adults are stuck in an eternal adolescence. But one of them, I suspect, is that people still enjoy reading about good people, and seeing them rewarded -- something that more respectable novels seldom offer these days. If that's the case, then Rowling might see a backlash over the next few months. Most popular on the Guardian Today in pictures After advising tourists against travel to the cities of Jammu and Srinagar for nearly 20 years, the