The Captive Reader

I’ve made a horrible habit this year of reading wonderful new releases, loving them, and then writing absolutely nothing about them.  I did it with Bellewether by Susanna Kearsley, Lands of Lost Borders by Kate Harris, Bookworm by Lucy Mangan, and, perhaps most egregiously given how much I adored it, Ayesha at Last by Uzma Jalaluddin.  But I will not do it with The Rise and Fall of Becky Sharp by Sarra Manning – in fact, I will even manage to review it within days of its release.  Victory.

As the title indicates, this is the story of Vanity Fair but Manning has updated Thackeray’s characters for the 21st Century and dialed up the glamour.  She has traded rural aristocrats for eccentric acting royalty, regimental balls for the Cannes film festival, and the wilds of India for the wilds of LA.  It is all joyfully fun and at the heart of it is a perfectly done Becky Sharp, just as clever and manipulative as the original but with even more ambition – and, in this egalitarian age when any pretty girl with an Instagram account can make her fortune, even more tools to reach the heights she aspires to.

Orphaned in her mid-teens, we meet Becky at age 20 as she is coming out of the Big Brother house, having finished as runner-up to sweet, naïve Amelia Sedley.  Becky, despite all her plotting and strategizing in the house, soon discovers that reality star fame is measured in days and, after mooching off of the Sedleys, finds herself working as a nanny for Pitt Crawley, an aging star who has rejected acting – sort-of – in favour of living an “authentic” life.  But rural obscurity with a sexagenarian trying to seduce her daily is not Becky’s idea of life.  And so, with the arrival of Rawdon Crawley, Pitt’s actor son who seems poised for success, and Mattie Crawley, Pitt’s elder sister and a grande dame of the acting world, she begins her careful manoeuvrings.

Where Thackeray’s Becky had only beauty, charm, and cunning to aid her, Manning’s Becky has all those plus a PR team (or rather Rawdon’s PR team, whom she acquires after their marriage) and powerful social media platforms to assist her rise in the world.  Soon she is being sponsored by luxury brands, hobnobbing with all the right people, and hosting a chicly ironic sausage-and-mash salon (a brilliant touch) that attracts everyone from Zadie Smith to Kim Kardashian.  She has arrived.

But we all know how that goes.  Lord Steyne is a media magnate, naturally, so Becky’s fall is tabloid fodder across the world.  She is decried as a liar, a thief, a whore…all the usual things.  But, in a perfect moment of satire, there is at least one newspaper willing to stand up for her:

Only the Guardian had come to her defense in some long-winded opinion piece about social mobility and how there weren’t many routes open to working-class girls from broken homes, and so who could blame Becky for weaponizing her sexuality?

I laughed until I had tears when I read that.

Tabloids or not, Becky is not a woman anyone can keep down.  When we leave her, she is rising again – and aspiring to truly dizzying heights.

In her retelling, Manning changes very little of the story’s essentials.  There are fewer deaths, which is rather nice, and the timeline is condensed but that is it.  If you love Vanity Fair, you will find everything you love still here.  And if you don’t know it yet, this would be a very fun introduction, though I can’t help feeling it would be a shame.  I think you’d miss some of Manning’s own cleverness without knowing the original.  There is a horse called Pianoforte!  Who cannot love that who knows the books?

While Vanity Fair is famously a novel without a hero, its male characters – while consistently unheroic – are all well-represented.  George Osborne is now a slimy young conservative politician, Rawdon Crawley is a troubled actor with drug and gambling addictions, Dobbin is an earnest soldier (the only character who required no updating whatsoever) and Jos Sedley is…no, that’s too good to tell you.  You must read that for yourself.

And what of Amelia, to whom the fates (and Thackeray) deal so many blows in a few short years?  I am happy to say Manning is a little kinder to her this time around but she is still the Amelia we know and would love to shake some gumption in to.  When we meet her, she is a timid, sweet girl, whose wildest romantic fantasies haven’t evolved since adolescence:

…what she secretly wished was that George would be so overcome by the sight of her that he’d be the one to stride over and take her in his arms, kiss her on the forehead, and murmur throatily, ‘I’ve missed you, Emmy.  Missed you more than I can say.’

Amelia, interestingly, is where Manning makes the greatest deviation from her source material and it is all for the better.  Generations of readers have warmed to Amelia but pitied her.  Manning gives her something to do and to excel at – and the fact that it upsets George enormously makes it all the sweeter.  It is also another way for Manning to tie in more contemporary satire, which I will never say no to.

I loved this book and had so much fun reading it.  I had fully intended to wait for my upcoming holiday and read it after long days spent hiking in the Austrian Alps.  Instead, I bought it as soon as the e-book was released on Saturday (the paperback was released yesterday) and raced through it over the rest of the weekend.  I regret nothing.  It was funny and clever and just what I needed.  There is a new television adaptation of Vanity Fair airing right now on ITV but, much as I love costume dramas, I see no need for it.  Admittedly, this is partly because my love for the 1998 BBC adaptation is all consuming – Philip Glenister as Dobbin!  What more do you need, people? – but why waste time on television when you could instead pass a few hours with this fresh, clever tale?

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