I didn’t think I was going to like this book. There were a few factors: the female name for a title (even when they are done knowingly, as in this case, I don’t want to be exhausted by literary in-jokes from page one, they’re like sitting next to a smug bore at a dinner party); the Vanity Fair allusions, when such structural parallels so often feel like tiresome creative writing exercises; the glaring possibility of over-simplified feminism, made worse by May’s author’s note at the beginning. (Here, she explicates her aims in writing the book, which naturally set alarm bells ringing. Why, unless Becky fails entirely, would she feel the need to explain it, rather than let it speak for itself? Show don’t tell, and all that. This remains true, and the author’s note ought to be skipped or, if the publisher’s reading this, omitted entirely.)
Yet, Becky surprised me. The tripping present tense suits the bleary relentlessness of the era, and the plot is almost unbearably engrossing. But it was Becky Sharp’s unremitting dislikeability that really hooked me. It’s so refreshing not to be presented with good people, trying their best. Also, the 1990s setting meant there wasn’t one person discussing recycling – hallelujah! This book is set in the last decade devoid of crushing environmental guilt, which authors writing contemporary fiction are obliged to include (this is perhaps why so many books are set in the recent past these days?). Instead, we have boozing, heartless sex and neoliberal capitalism, all at their shameless zenith. At the centre of it all is Becky, a neat mixture of Thackery’s anti-hero and a fictionalised Rebekah Brooks. The novel follows her wondrously vicious rise to the editorship of The Mercury, a tabloid that then gets embroiled in a phone hacking scandal (sound familiar?).
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To me, May is at her subtle best when describing the nuanced horror of the class system in Britain, and its ultimate impenetrability. We’re only let down when she feels obliged to give Becky a sad, murky backstory. This didn’t read convincingly. Also, it’s too simple. Not all bad people have good reasons, and Becky would have been more interesting if she’d been allowed her greed and cruelty sans the pop-psychoanalysis. Still, Becky was addictive reading, the character’s darkness providing welcome relief in these over-bright times.
