Harry Potter, we need you now!

The Casual Vacancy, the new novel for adults by Harry Potter’s creator J. K. Rowling is until the last few pages a thoroughly dispiriting read. It’s set in the small English town of Pagford, which comprises a middle class area, and the Fields, a sad Council-house ghetto of squalor and despair.

The lives of many of the town-centre characters we meet reveal an absence of grace and love, a selfish small-mindedness, a lack of integrity. The lives of the folk from the Fields are broken by degradation, addiction and abuse.  Pagford is a community affected by what today we describe as character flaws, but which as Libby Purves pointed out in the Times last week Christians used to call sin.

Frankly, Pagford sounds a bit like hell. How different from the Harry Potter books, where Harry and Hermione and Ron battle along with Professor Dumbledore on the side of goodness and light.  There, the distinction between good and evil is, for the most part, clear. In Pagford’s sad Muggle-land such light as there is in peoples’ lives is mixed with darkness. Is the victory of light something we must leave behind us like a book read in childhood? Oh, Harry Potter we need you now!

The only outstanding character in the novel, Barry Fairbrother was born in the Fields but overcame his person difficulties. Though not without flaws, his life is marked by grace, and by a big-hearted optimism. But just three pages in, Barry dies.

Religious faith doesn’t feature highly in the life of Pagford. The vicar of the church of St Michael and All Saints is a shadowy caricature. We hear of no active Christian voice or engagement in the community.

A Sikh family remind us of their conviction that ‘the light of God shines from every soul.’ And in the Church a stained-glass window depicts St Michael with a sword in one hand and scales in the other. ‘A sandaled foot rested on the back of a writhing bat-winged Satan.’

But there is little evidence in Rowling’s pages of the light of God shining from the souls of Pagford, and the defeated figure beneath St Michael’s foot seems still to be active in their lives.

And yet, at the very end of the novel, following two tragic deaths, some of the characters undergo significant change, as though blown on a new course of hope and purpose by some wind of grace. However, other characters remain untouched. And a young woman, in whose life there have always been glimmerings of grace despite her dire circumstances is one of those who doesn’t make it to the end of the book.

How authentic is this change in peoples’ attitudes? Is it merely an author’s sleight of hand, driven by Rowling’s desire for an up-beat ending? Perhaps. But it’s the kind of thing you’d expect in a world where the finger of God’s grace is always present, where God’s awakening whisper assures us that change is possible. Some of us listen and respond, some of us close our ears, and there is always the mystery of those to whom bad things happen even though they long for change.

Rowling tells us that Barry Fairbrother had seen things in someone from the Fields ‘which were invisible to other people’s eyes.’ He had discerned her potential, glimpsed possibilities. God sees in us things which may be invisible to other people. God sees the things we want to hide, which is scary; but God also sees the longings present in our sinful, mixed-up lives, a longing for joy, for grace, for change; and God sees in us a potential which we don’t yet recognise ourselves. 

We may think we have left Harry Potter behind when we turn from the child’s view of reality and embrace the perplexing narrative of adult life, but in fact the whisper of grace is heard there just as clearly, and there we can meet the real Harry Potter, whose victorious foot holds down the ‘bat-winged Satan.’ 

His name is Jesus Christ, who died at the very start of the Christian story but who now lives for ever, brooding lovingly in Spirit over the Pagford of our hearts. 

The Casual Vacancy is not a religious book, nor was it intended to be. But read from a Christian perspective it is a book about the tragedy of life without grace, and the triumph of grace in the lives of those who are open to it. It challenges us to welcome this grace, and then, changed by it, to be ambassadors of grace acting in our communities with Barry Fairbrother hearts, seeing and encouraging potential, urging people to welcome the inner light of a beckoning God, pointing to Jesus Christ as the source of all hope.

(Christian Viepoint column from the Highland News dated 1st November 2012)