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.
We meet May’s Rebecca as she is applying for a job at an upmarket nanny agency, altering her posture and accent to disguise the “stench of need”. She bonds with the recruiter over their shared experience at boarding school. In fact, Becky only knows the school because her mother was the cleaner. Neglected at home, she despises her own origins, a hatred that eats away at her even as she progresses from nannying the children of a media mogul to marrying said mogul’s son from his first marriage, and advancing her career in newspapers.
This could have been a standard rags to riches story, but May is too sophisticated a writer for that. “People have outgrown the fairytale Princess,” Becky tells her paper’s royal correspondent in 1994, and the line could apply to her as well as Diana. This Becky Sharp, unlike Thackeray’s, rejects the Cinderella tactic of hitching one’s star to a high-ranking man. Yes, she marries Rawdon Crawley, but it is her professional acumen that carries her to the editorship of the Mercury. And her ruthlessness: this is someone who earns her living by knocking others down.
Setting up her main character in this way is a risky tactic for May. Her Becky lacks the famous charm and warmth of both her namesakes, but nor does she get a villainous kick out of splashing her friends’ scandals over her front page – which leaves her in a grey area. Her narrative, given in the present tense, is low on affect, Becky’s main emotion being fear. When things go seriously wrong, she feels only numbness as she sinks deeper into the slough. Which is perfectly plausible – but leaves us feeling somewhat numb, too.
May is at her best in her heartbreaking account of a child abduction, a fictional conflation of the Sarah Payne and Milly Dowler cases. The abduction strikes a chord with Becky – herself a lost child, of sorts – and she gets involved, befriending the family, envious of yet repulsed by their stifling domesticity. This leads to the phone-hacking trial, with Becky in the dock alongside her juniors. May leaves us in no doubt that this, rather than any celebrity exposé, is the real scandal: press intrusion into, and manipulation of, a family’s tragedy.
If May has made her modern-day Becky Sharp a joyless, fearful character, can we blame her? The comedy of Thackeray’s heroine stems from the way she knows how the world works from the very beginning, staying one step ahead of everyone else. This Becky walks a much more difficult path, fighting the system and learning to repress her own fears in order to capitalise on other people’s. There is no place here for the hyper-vivid eccentricity of May’s earlier works; this is a novel firmly grounded in our depressing reality.
• Becky by Sarah May is published by Picador (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
