Mention William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, and the image that comes to most people’s minds is that of young Becky Sharp flinging her copy of Johnson’s “Dixonary” – a school leaving present – out of the carriage window as it drives off. It’s a defiant gesture typical of this high-spirited heroine, who grapples her way up through society from poor-orphan status to financial and social security.
Becky’s story has been updated for the mass-media age by Sarah May, author of The Nudist Colony, as well as several lighter novels such as The Rise and Fall of the Queen of Suburbia, a blackly comic take on middle-class family disasters. Here, it seems May has roughly mapped the story of Thackeray’s heroine on to elements of Rebekah Brooks, the former tabloid editor turned CEO of News UK. Although May insists in her introduction that her characters are entirely fictitious, there’s the ambition, the “trademark restless hair”, the rapid ascent to the top of the tabloid career ladder.
