You there, looking at yourself in the mirror, what do you desire? (Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray)

Member Name: okei

Product:	Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Date:	22/04/09 (113 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great story. Very well written. Humorous. Realistic.

Disadvantages: Relentless. Merciless. Long. Episodic, so easy to stop at the end of an episode and lose interest.

Published in periodical form in 1847-8, when "making love" meant saying nice things to someone of the opposite sex, this massive novel (of over 900 pages in some editions) achieved instant critical success and recognition for its author, putting Thackeray alongside Dickens as one of the great authors of the Victorian era. Indeed, on this novel alone many considered him to be the greater. Personally, I'm not qualified to make such comparisons and to pass such judgements, so I review it for what it is.

It is the tale of the parallel lives of two women, once upon a time friends at a finishing school. One is rich, much loved by all, kind, faithful and sensitive, while the other, orphaned as a child, is poor, cold-hearted, self-centred and scheming, though talented and clever. Both leave school together, sitting side-by-side in the same horse-drawn carriage, and from this common starting point, we trace their rise and fall as fate deals each their hand.

The book could almost be divided into Acts like a play (instead of the much smaller chapters of which there are 67), though it is in usual narrative form, with the occasional aside to introduce a new character and paint him into the picture and the inclusion of correspondence to progress the plot. First, there is failed courtship, the slow art of seduction, then marriage, the battle of Waterloo that would tear their lives apart, and in the end perhaps a kind of redemption. It is a history of its times, a bringing together of "scenes of life", ruthless in its details, entertaining if one can overcome the barrier of time that separates us, and endure the sheer length of it. Vanity Fair is a stage, the world of the middle and upper-middle classes are its puppets, "a very vain, wicked, foolish place, full of all sorts of humbugs and falseness and pretensions", where wealth and nobility are mistaken for good and happiness. Thackeray, like the modern reader, is deeply satirical of his age; as if to emphasize this, the subtitle of the book was 'A Novel without a Hero', a brutally realistic snapshot of Victorian England. And his deep dislike of the greed and hypocrisy of what he saw around him is very understandable as someone who himself was born exceptionally wealthy, but found himself for a decade prior to this novel (through a combination of idleness, banking crashes and an unfortunate marriage) in the unfortunate position of having to write prodigiously on myriad topics to earn his living. He had been an illustrator too, and the text is adorned throughout with little sketches by Thackeray himself. Indeed, he had almost been commissioned as illustrator for great Dickens himself and had that been so, this book, this outstanding monument of its time, might never have come to be!

Summary: Take a look now at your true reflection. Do you like what you see?