The inside scoop
No one’s dirty secret is safe while Becky’s on the job
This story is a modern retelling of Victorianera novel Vanity Fair by William Thackeray. I haven’t read that book, but I did watch a TV adaptation, so I’m familiar with the character of social-climbing Becky Sharp, constantly fighting to better her circumstances as life throws curveballs at her. In the original novel, Becky is a real hustler and so recasting her for contemporary times as a relentlessly ambitious tabloid journalist is a smart idea.
The Becky of this novel is a girl who grows up poor in a wealthy area and develops a few chips on her shoulder as a result. When she lands a job working as a nanny for the Crawley family, she sees her opportunity to start making her way up. Her boss Pitt Crawley is editor of the Mercury newspaper and Becky is set on becoming a reporter. She can write, she has talent and is ruthless. Really, there is nothing to stop her rising to the top in the cut-throat world of tabloid newspapers of the 1990s.
As she pursues headlinegrabbing stories, despite the men who try to block her, Becky is determinedly set on power, success and revenge. She is a British tabloid journalist who puts getting the big exclusive in front of absolutely everything, even basic decency. And that is the real problem here; Becky is such a monster, she is impossible to warm to in any way. Also, if the aim was to explore what it takes to create a person like that, then I’m not convinced this novel manages it.
We are told that all the characters are fictitious, however the plot is quite clearly inspired by the phone-hacking scandal that erupted in the tabloid newspaper world early this century and which involved another “Becky”, former editor of the News of the World Rebekah Brooks.
As a fiction, it is grubby and nasty, but it’s also clever and makes some pretty compelling points about sexism and ethics. Becky is a book you can’t help being gripped by, but that doesn’t leave you feeling very good about anything.