For me, J K Rowling embodies a memory of wizards past; I read the first four Harry Potter books as a child and then lost interest a little. Probably a damning confession, but I imagined this would make for a fair reading of The Casual Vacancy. However, as I ploughed through the five hundred and three page tome, I realised that the novel is lacking in much more than magic.

The book is a very strange manifestation of the freedom that Harry Potter has bought Rowling. She is a self-confessed ‘moral writer’, although her latest work is far from the ‘retelling of the Communist Manifesto’ that it has been dubbed by The Telegraph. Had it been, it may have had more to offer by being more provocative or a little more profound.

This story of a sleepy English town and a neighbouring council estate is a sturdy fortress of cliché and pretension; there is little character development, and what there is could be written by anyone else in touch with modern stereotypes. What makes it ‘adult fiction’ is the incessant, often unrealistic swearing, the rough sex, the heroin, the relentless nastiness and the occasional use of words like ‘obstreperous’.

While Rowling seems eager to explore important social and political issues, the writing is often hard to reconcile with its weighty ambitions. Between these two covers lies almost everything that it wrong with humanity, yet it offers no meaning, no explanation or motivation and no real point. Rowling’s working title was Responsibility, and while I’m glad she opted for something a little less self-righteous, this idea and all the prejudices it embodies haunts the book.

Everyone here has their agenda: the over-worked social worker, the stuffy middle classes, the Indians, the child beaters, the teaching staff and the misunderstood teenagers. Sadly, they are each stiflingly predictable and, at least in their execution, banal. Without spoiling the ending, I persevered hoping that it was here that I would find the method and that loose ends would be tied satisfactorily; perhaps here the violent actions and dubious writing would culminate in something good. It didn’t.

Rowling has crammed too much into one novel and as a result, she has lost any sense of individuality or purpose. The novel switches quickly from one character to another or from one house to another, creating a style which has the potential to broaden the scope of a novel, but here creates a strange kind of claustrophobia.

Changes of perspective are explicitly marked by italics or parenthesis or, at its worst, by inconsistent dialect; there is no subtlety, no mystery, and despite often terrifying content, the novel is more grey comedy than it is black, more Eastenders than tragedy. The overarching narrative is not the ‘frilly tablecloth of polite fiction’ woven by the characters in their own lives, but nor is it hard hitting, tender or even particularly interesting.

We know that drug addicts and rape victims live horrendous lives; we know that villages can be insular, gossip ridden, that their inhabitants can be frustrated and repressed; we know that local politics can be more vicious and selfish than cabinet meetings. Rowling’s latest book does nothing but regurgitate theses snippets which literature has taken for granted for years.

At its best, the book is commercial fiction that will sell; while it poses questions when it has no real desire to answer them, it is certainly a good yarn in parts. However, at its worst, it merely props up the hardened and dangerous perspectives one hopes that Rowling was attempting to break down. At times, it feels as though Rowling just enjoys writing about bad things and their bad repercussions, with no real willingness to challenge or change. After five hundred and three pages, The Casual Vacancy becomes exactly that: flippant and empty.