#34 - Vanity Fair

Right off the bat, let's settle some things. Vanity Fair is a magazine currently in its fifth iteration as a magazine, with 2 British editions and 2 American editions coming before the current American edition, which started in 1983. The 4th iteration, the 2nd American edition, actually merged with and was absorbed by what remains today as Vogue. Before the first magazine was produced, there was this book, Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray. But the origin of all of these Vanity Fairs is the original, a setting in the John Bunyan book Pilgrim's Progress (#44 on my list), in which travelers are distracted by a never-ending festival of all of the worldly enjoyments of life, keeping them from moving further along the moral road. Thackeray's Vanity Fair is set in Napoleonic Britain, providing a very interesting contrast with Tolstoy's War and Peace, approaching from the East. The upper-crust society that Thackeray describes is filled with nepotism, alcoholics, superficiality and hypocrisy, all as part of his scathing social critique on the nobility of the time. With this, Thackeray established himself as one of the most popular writers of the era, matched only by Charles Dickens, whose fame has lasted significantly better.

Speaking of Dickens, this novel suffers from the same tragic flaw as both Dickensian works and War and Peace - it was published in serial form. Now, Tolstoy used the opportunity to expand the world he was writing in to epic proportions, but Thackeray instead used it to recite his favourite moral lectures and toss asides to friends and readers into the main thrust of the story. I've always disliked the style forced by the serial format, but here is the first place where I've truly wondered if it could remove artistic quality from the piece, and I think is does. Vanity Fair could have been one of my top books ever, but it should not be 951 pages (in my Wordsworth Classics edition, published 1992), not even close. With a team of good editors and a machete, this manuscript could have been easily reduced to 400, maybe as low as 250 pages, and the effects would have been so much purer. I'm not advocating Fitzgerald-like wordsmithing, but I am being convinced more and more that every word needs to have a purpose to belong on the page (I know, this is one of my wordiest and sloppiest reviews, but it's been a long semester).

That all said, there was true genius in the book, and that was in the clarity of his character work. The foibles, so important to his satire, were just realistic enough to keep the pressure on the message behind it. The subtitle of Vanity Fair is A Novel Without A Hero, but readers have since argued that that statement is purposefully gendered - implying that the Hero-ine is one of the two main female leads, Amelia Osborne (nee Sedley) or Rebecca "Becky" Crawley (nee Sharp). The pair are wonderful opposites, and both are enviable roles, which may be why there have been half a dozen adaptations of the book. Amelia is sweet and innocent and gentle, while Becky is clever and talented and determined. Becky's skills at satire, seduction and society mask a deeper, almost psychopathic disregard for other people. In fact, some interpretations go so far as to suggest she may have murdered another character in the close of the book. But many of the adaptations go out of their way to justify Becky's actions as a child of poverty whose drive for financial stability is understandable, even laudable. Personally, while I find Becky a compellingly twisted villainess, I wouldn't go as far as describing her as evil - were she born into luxury, she'd be no worse than a Daisy Buchanan. Amelia, on the other hand, I find more challenging. Her naivete and lack of subtext appears as warm and genuine, but in the end is entirely weak, vapid and simply...not worth the time. Dobbin, who longs for her as a "girl-on-pedestal" for much of the book, says as much in one of the book's best passages, of which there were many.

And there were many, and there was plenty of other great stuff too. But because Thackeray had to fill 20 issues of a magazine, he surrounded it with loads of filler, and because of that, what could have been a back-to-back 10/10 is instead receiving a -2 mark for being written in a stupid era/format, giving it:

8/10