JK Rowling: 'The Casual Vacancy' is just like Harry Potter I don't know why everyone's so surprised about The Casual Vacancy, J K Rowling's first foray into the world of adult books. If she'd written an adult novel before Harry Potter, it would no doubt have been much like this one: heroin addicts, teen pregnancies, parish feuds and all. Harry Potter's experiments with Felix Felicis, the potion that makes him lucky, aren't that different from ecstasy, after all. In a book like Ursula Le Guin's The Wizard of Earthsea, magic is part of the sinews of the universe. When the spells stop working in her novel The Farthest Shore, you feel that the entire world will implode and vanish: a Ragnarok for the end of the gods. In Alan Garner's Weirdstone fantasies, old magic is entwined with our reality to the extent that Susan becomes one of the Pleiades - which means that she is totally removed from the human world. Magic is something separate, pulsing, other. This is not the case with Harry Potter. The enchanting space Rowling created in those seven increasingly weighty Hogwartian books is not one in which old, real magic is involved. It is a carefully controlled, closed system, which falls apart the moment you start thinking about it. And why? Because it is exactly the world of Pagford, the little West Country town in The Casual Vacancy - but with magical knobs on. Why do wizards, being so powerful, still use Muggle objects, and yet claim to have no knowledge of the ordinary people they live alongside? Take away a wizard's wand in Harry Potter and they do not fade, like Sparrowhawk would in Earthsea; they just become a Muggle. Even a wizard with a wand is still a Muggle, with all the pettinesses and gripes of a local parish council. Why, for instance, does Hermione, the daughter of dentists, have no difficulty slipping into this strange new world? It's because she recognises it as that of her parents. The battles between Good and Evil are not cosmic: they are those of the fireside, gone when the book has been put away. The magical decoration is a way of exploring the very same social issues that Rowling is concerned with in The Casual Vacancy. Remove the spells from Harry Potter, and what do you have? An "issues" book - ironically, the very sort of book that was popular at the time Harry Potter came out; the sort of book that meant many publishers turned Rowling down, because it wasn't gritty enough. There is class war, as exemplified by Draco Malfoy's sneering stance towards the suburban Potter. There are worries about the welfare of disadvantaged peoples - as seen in Hermione's smug campaign for the rights of House Elves. Harry's orphanhood becomes something you might find in a Jacqueline Wilson novel. Rowling's magic framework has the effect of both flattening and exaggerating characteristics. Nobody is ever anything but what you expect them to be (even Snape is constantly good, it's just that nobody else knows). What kind of world would it be if everybody was confined by one aspect? It would be a pretty bleak place. And that is what Rowling has shown in this new book. If you take away the magical filter, what you have left is still her cartoon world, where everything is black and white, where Voldemort is Bad and Harry Potter is Good. That is the world of The Casual Vacancy: where everything is what you'd expect, but nothing is true.