Vanity Fair (1998 adaptation)

It's weird that I've never read any Thackeray--but then people don't much, anymore, to the horror of some of the older Victorianists at conferences. He's ageing out of the canon, and Trollope is sliding off to the side as well. It's about teachability, adaptation, fitness to theses and post-doctoral research, heritage industry shenanigans and the alchemy of textual endurance. Canon is an evolving thing, shaped by a lot of competing imperatives. It's always funny when people talk about Dickens and Austen as highly canonical writers, because yes, I guess it does seem like that when you buy the sausage at the supermarket, but they're quite recent additions (both of which were highly and hotly contested). They're the first to get swiped at by the general public, but they are, not coincidentally, actually also the left 'diversity' picks (chav-populist and lady-populist--Austen wasn't that posh either, which people forget). Sometimes I think they're in the vanguard at the moment because that's also, of necessity, the line of fire. You do see that a lot--the highly-exposed token woman employee whose prominence means she takes the heat for others' poor decisions, etc. It's hard, almost, for a lot of people even to name other 'canon' English writers now, as if the actual, traditional canon has slipped behind a screen (even Shakespeare is kind of Mark 1 of the same phenomenon). I'm never sure what's happening, here. I've given it some thought, but I can't quite put my finger on it. It's not like the cognoscenti are off enjoying Spenser in the back--no one can stand Spenser anymore. C.S. Lewis was the last person to actually enjoy the poem, since then it's just been that one Japanese research team composed, one must presume, entirely of masochists.

Anyway, to the extent you can determine this via the translation of adaptation, this was sort of what I'd thought Thackeray was going to be--'the greatest Victorian novelist!1' because he's posh, cold/restrained (quite relatedly--'restraint' as a class affect, the inverse of 'gosh aren't black people so loud in movie theatres??' bullshit), not particularly political (very relatedly--and no, 'satires on high society' aren't political, it's an obvious Bakhtin carnival pressure valve that enables the untroubled survival of the system as a whole, court jester-ass behaviour), holding all the characters in a suspension of universal distaste. This wasn't bad, but I don't know that I enjoyed it. The adaptation wasn't very well paced, dragging hard from the middle and wrapping up nigh-instantaneously after speed-running an excellent Philip Glenister's disenchantment with courtly love in a way that made him seem to suddenly swerve from being the best guy in the book to something of a Nice Guy entitled asshole. The casting seemed good, though I'm unfamiliar with the originals. I don't really believe that randoms in small towns in Germany know the power of Lord Whateverthefuck in such a way that he could blacken Becky's name in Baden Badtimes or whatever, no matter the extent of his malice. Even now, with the internet and increased global trade, I do not think that even literal Jeff Bezos has the reach to cut off the resourceful Becky's avenues of escape to this degree. I know it's for the Vine/plot, but even so.

Katy liked the Becky's circular return to her first, low-ambition target. She also contends that Thackeray does have time for some people (including, notably, and surprisingly, Becky's fuckboi husband, and of course Becky herself). I do see it, but for me the overall atmosphere was kind of relentlessly lowering, like suffering through more of fucking 'Jin Ping Mei' (such a monotonous tale of iniquity that by the end of it the mere mention of sex will bore you). And I guess someone will claim that's Realism, baybee, but like, it's a realism, and it's also a stylistic choice in the way Grimdark is (and it's not like I have a problem with continental realist writers, for the most part). I guess there's a chance I'm just being partisan, but also I tend to know what I'm not going to like and why going in because of what it is. If something's been praised for its austere satirical cynicism, I'm not surprised when there's a classed 'pwease steppy' vibe to the reader response. Writer's gotta be clever, bloke knew Latin. The issue, then, isn't 'how well-realised will this shrimp cocktail be?', it's that I'm deathly allergic to shrimp, or that the shrimp's gone off. (I'm not. And the shrimp can't go off, it's a metaphor. And nothing's open on a Sunday anyway.)

Liked the credits-sequence pig. And of course a hearty hello to Margoyles, Auntie MM. British period dramas always feel like weird office parties--it's that guy again, from Accounts. Him with the chin. No, the OTHER chin--

Baby didn't seem to fancy it either. Pitched a fit during the finale. More like William Makewar--

EDIT: Also it's super weird in the adaptation for Becky to be sobbing and upset in the 'I am innocent' period, because in this context she definitively isn't, even if things got out of hand, and she's frankly too smart to be surprised that a messy situation came to a fairly inevitable conclusion. What did she think would happen?

Katy also wondered where all this money was going.