Smackhead cows in the backyard

Krystal had never shot up before … but she knew how to heat the spoon, and about the tiny little ball of cotton wool you used to soak up the dissolved smack, and act as a filter when you were filling the syringe. She knew that the crook of the arm was the best place to find a vein, and she knew to lay the needle as flat as possible against the skin.

Yes, J.K.Rowling is back — though I have to admit, I don’t myself recall passages like this in the Harry Potter sequence, nor all the f***s and c***s or detailed descriptions of a teenage boy’s enthusiasm for porn. It seems unlikely they appeared in the 300-odd pages of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince that were left when I finally abandoned it, unable to put up with it any longer.

After the end of the Harry Potter cavalcade, J.K.Rowling has moved into adult fiction, not with the fantasy novel or the detective story that might have been predicted, but with an ambitious attempt to give an account of a community. The Casual Vacancy explores connections within a rich and picturesque West Country town after the death of a well-liked councillor with a sense of social responsibility.

On the outskirts of historic Pagford there stands a council estate of the most desperate sort: drug addiction and feral children are a plague that most people would very much like to be rid of. One family, the Weedons — a heroin-addicted mother, her ignorant teenage daughter and neglected or abused small son — are particularly worrying. They had been supported and helped by Barry, the councillor who dies at the beginning of the book; now they are struggling against all the odds.

The action is driven by the collapse of the Weedons, and also by a division created by the election to fill Barry’s place.