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A review by mutable_me
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
3.0
I wouldn't call this my favorite victorian novel by any means, but I've always been fascinated by the trick Thackeray pulls on the reader here. Despite his proclamation of the text as "A Novel Without A Hero", over the course of the sprawling narrative of the crafty, amoral Becky Sharp and her somewhat boring victorian-stock-heroine schoolmate and former friend Amelia Sedley, I had begun to read Vanity Fair as a standard Dickensian tale of misadventures and tragedy barreling towards a somewhat contrived, happy resolution. Imagine my surprise then, arriving at the conclusion, whereupon (without revealing too much!) Thackeray pulls the rug out from under the reader, revealing that Becky is every bit as bad as we've imagined her, and that even the supposedly heroic characters are flawed and perhaps not so noble after all.
That said, for all the fun comedy bits and Becky's place as one of the most interesting victorian female protagonists, like many satires the book is perhaps just a bit too cynical for its own good. While Thackeray performs some clever tricks with his reader's expectations, when all is said and done he still plays primarily to the staid middle-class victorian morality one would expect from a novel of this vintage, and that is somewhat disappointing.
That said, for all the fun comedy bits and Becky's place as one of the most interesting victorian female protagonists, like many satires the book is perhaps just a bit too cynical for its own good. While Thackeray performs some clever tricks with his reader's expectations, when all is said and done he still plays primarily to the staid middle-class victorian morality one would expect from a novel of this vintage, and that is somewhat disappointing.