* * * *
This review is based
on a free review copy from the publisher via NetGalley UK.
This novel is billed
as a modern work of fiction based on the framework of Thackeray’s
Vanity Fair. As legal fig-leaves go this is a trifle voile, but voile
can be very enticing!
It is a
fictionalised reworking of the past three decades-odd of tabloid
history seen through the eyes of Becky Sharp, the orphaned daughter
of a single mother who rises to be the campaigning editor of The
Mercury newspaper and then CEO of its parent company, at which point
the establishment (and her husband) decide that she is too powerful
and she is taken down. (In astronomical terms, Mercury is the nearest
object to the Sun.)
The narrative treads
carefully at a safe distance around some of the real stories that
inspire it, such as the Milly Dowler case, whilst quite cheerfully
clipping the kerb on others. A sentence about the son of a prime
minister and property fraud will probably stay out of court only by
the author’s judicious use of the word “eldest”.
The heroine, Becky
Sharp, pursues her career and her agenda very adroitly but also
ruthlessly, upsetting and frightening the rich and powerful as she
goes. But her downfall is engineered by those rich and powerful
people around a case where she is genuinely doing her best to protect
the most vulnerable and expose the way the establishment protects
sexual predators, more than a few of whom are key establishment
figures (as it turns out, Becky knew this from her own personal
childhood experience). Her paper closes and Becky narrowly avoids
jail, because of actions taken by employees and peers that she didn’t
know about. There are obvious echoes, there, of real-life events.
But the idea that
Becky’s downfall suits an establishment that habitually turns a
blind eye to much worse things also has quite genuine roots in the
real world. The News of the World closed because of a phone hacking
scandal, but the BBC DID NOT close its doors (nor were ANY criminal
charges even contemplated) when one of its reporters used forged
documents and a false narrative to not only persuade “a princess”
to grant him a career-defining interview, but to also shape and
manipulate what she thought and thereby what she said in that
interview. Nor did the BBC close when one of its much more
respectable broadcasters wrote to three Appeal Court Judges
instructing them to uphold the conviction of a mentally-vulnerable
man for a very high-profile crime, apparently because if it wasn’t
committed by him, it must have been committed by someone like him!
Which neatly encapsulates the way many establishment figures view us
peasants and all our rights!
The rich and
powerful in Britain hold SO MUCH power that their behaviour, in both
their personal and official lives, can only be kept in check by a
Becky Sharp or someone like her, willing and able to actually take
them down when they transgress. And if all the Becky Sharps are
abolished, then the behaviour of the rich and powerful will
inevitably get worse and worse with every year that passes, till
London becomes like Brussels, then like Moscow and then like Sodom.
Becky by Sarah May
is published in the UK by Pan MacMillan on the 26th of
January 2023
