Insofar as every reading of a book is a retelling of it, a writer needs a very good reason for doing a ‘contemporary retelling’ of a classic. In giving Becky Sharp the fleshed-out backstory denied her in Vanity Fair, Sarah May more than meets that requirement, though her novel still suffers by its proximity to Thackeray’s original.
That shadow is particularly occluding in Becky’s early chapters, when the reader’s instinct is to look for what they know, not what is new. To speak only of the unmissable differences, then, May’s Becky is a Gen Xer, not a Georgian, an aspiring journalist, not a socialite, and her story is told in the first person, not the third, a choice that puts her at the centre of the narrative in a way she never is in Vanity Fair.
This narrative begins, familiarly, in the office of Miss Pinkerton, here the head of a nanny agency rather than a school. With a little massaging of her CV, Becky wins a position in the nursery of Pitt Crawley, the editor of ‘the country’s biggest selling tabloid, the Mercury’ and a man whose promise of a job at the paper comes with the usual predatory conditions. But she is on her way.
As Becky rises through the Mercury’s ranks, the novel flashes back to what was only ever glimpsed in Thackeray: her childhood. The daughter of a cleaner at a private school, Becky has grown up both in the vicinity of wealth and in painful consciousness of her lack of it – circumstances that, if not excuse, certainly explain her later actions. She was never so forgivable in Vanity Fair.
And there is a lot to forgive. Splashing gossip about Princess Diana, conducting personal vendettas in the paper she comes to edit, hacking the phone of a murdered schoolgirl with a resemblance to Milly Dowler, Becky starts to bear her own resemblance to real people. Fortunately for her, it is more the culture of misinformation that attracts May’s disapproval, a culture captured and condemned by Becky’s maxim ‘The pursuit of truth is a tedious business.’ It’s chilling to have that articulated.
What all this gains from Vanity Fair besides brand recognition, I still fail to see. It is silly to have contemporary characters called Rawdon and Pitt, and May’s Easter egg references to other old friends who are then not developed only remind us of the book we might be reading instead. Becky is a good novel dwarfed by a great one.
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