The Casual Vacancy, The Catcher in the Rye and Heartbreak Hotel

I have never been keen on soaps on TV and The Casual Vacancy is the literary equivalent. I didn't expect great writing from JK Rowling so I wasn't disappointed. What we did get was a tightly plotted but uneven drama full of nasty, argumentative people mainly being horrible to each other. I'm not sure what kept me going, probably I was hoping that something interesting might turn up. I guess it does, but only on occasions. As I said, pretty uneven. Some fairly tedious sections interspersed with a rare brilliantly constructed episode. A party and a break-up come to mind. So why did I give it as much as three stars? For one reason. The writing for the teenage characters was absolutely wizard. (Get it?) There are quite a few of them, and their stories take up a good chunk of the book. Here, the writing suddenly takes off. I'm sure it was not just my imagination.

My occasional dabble with classics led me to The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. I felt it was a bit of a let down. I found the first half of this short novel to be sharp and original. However I eventually found Holden, our seventeen year old narrator, to become quite tiresome and repetitive. Although the descriptions of New York in the fifties were very well written. I just wished I had had read it when I was a lot younger.

After the intensity of having just read "The Garden of Evening Mists" for Book Club,  I plumped for a change in style with Heartbreak Hotel by Deborah Moggach. I was thrilled with this funny and frivolous story for those of us of mature years. OK, it was fairly predictable as a number of lonely people descend upon ex-actor Buffy's run down B&B come hotel for his "Courses for Divorces". But the warmth of the storytelling is so powerful, it towed me a long in it's witty and manipulative wake. There is a feeling that, after the success of the movie "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel" that was based on the author's novel "These Foolish Things", this is a film script instead of a book, but there is too much to enjoy to quibble. Yes, the British acting establishment will be queuing up for the roles of Buffy, his ex-wives, his children and hotel guests, and it would make a decent movie. Except that some of the best stuff here relies on reminiscences of the character's previous lives, and at the same time being a study of city versus country as they are today. As an antidote to something serious, this is just the ticket.